


Cambion

by callowyn, thegeminisage



Series: Cambionverse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Centralia, Gen, Purgatory, Supernatural: The Next Generation, Team Free Will 2.0
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-14
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-21 04:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 62,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callowyn/pseuds/callowyn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegeminisage/pseuds/thegeminisage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse Turner has been trying to outrun his half-demon side since the apocalypse that wasn’t, but when a demon kills his parents, the need for vengeance drives him back to the house in Nebraska where he once lived. The absolute last thing Jesse needs is to meet a pair of hunters already at the scene—he’s learned the hard way not to trust anyone but himself. But Ben Braeden and Claire Novak don’t seem like they’ll be leaving him alone anytime soon: the same demon, they think, brought about the Winchesters’ mysterious disappearance three years prior. Pursued by the Queen of Hell and all the power she commands, their reluctant alliance slowly grows into something deeper, and when their path leads them to the gate of Purgatory itself, Jesse has to decide which he’s more scared of: his powers, or what he’ll lose if he can’t face them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This verse diverts from Supernatural canon during 6.21 "Let It Bleed" when Lisa, rather than being healed by Castiel, dies of the stab wound inflicted by the demon that possessed her. Everything from the season six finale and on has changed. Ben never lost his memories as he did in canon; instead, he went to live with Lisa's sister (the one she mentioned in _You Can't Handle The Truth_ ) and spent every summer vacation at Bobby's with Sam, and Dean—until the Winchesters disappeared. Ben took up hunting full-time to look for them, and Claire joined him on his search some six months later, for reasons she has never fully disclosed. Jesse has been in Australia from the time he vanished in _I Believe The Children Are Our Future_ until the start of this story.
> 
> Warning: This story contains descriptions of panic attacks, suicidal ideation, death by fire, moderate gore, and graphic torture. Please tread cautiously and let us know if there's anything else we missed.
> 
> And one final note: since we deleted the chapter at the end with the art (there was simply too much to put in one chapter, and the art is best viewed on [our tumblr](http://cambionverse.tumblr.com/)), we've done some chapter-rearranging! As such, comments on any particular given chapter may reference events to the chapter _after_ the current one, so you may want to stay away from the comments section entirely until you're finished.

There's a house in Nebraska burning to the ground.

The air in the front yard twists and becomes abruptly less empty. A man—boy, really, in spite of everything, wearing a ratty sweatshirt and smelling of deserts—falls into the flickering orange light. The journey has pained him, brief though it was. But the sight that greets him hurts more.

He knows that the people who lived in this house are dead. He'd know it even if he couldn't hear the silence under the fire's roar, even if he didn't intimately recognize the smell of burning flesh in the dark smoke. He knew they were dead before he came here.

Wind blows his hair away from his face, and smoke stings his eyes. Part of him wants to go inside, one last time, just to see. Just to make sure.

The vision plays clear in his mind—his parents' faces, the spurts of blood, throats slit long before the flame caught. The glowing yellow eyes and shadowed smile speaking from a mirror, backlit by fire: _time to come home_.

He doesn't move.

This isn't the first time he's been hunted, and it won't be the first time someone learned how fatal a mistake it is to think him prey. When he finds the thing that did this, he's going to tear it into so many pieces it might as well have never existed.

The sound of sirens in the distance makes him turn. Dawn already threatens the sky behind the smoke, and this street won't stay deserted for long. He clenches his fists and turns away from the house. He'll be back.

By the time Jesse Turner disappears into the shadows, the fires have all gone dark.

 

 

 

* * *

# C A M B I O N

* * *

 

 

 _2349 Lakefield Dr_   
_Bill & Beth Turner_

Jesse brings his fingers up to the mailbox, dull white under the overcast evening sky. He remembers painting lopsided race cars with his father on the wooden box that had been here before. This one is storebought, cheap plastic; appropriate for a childless couple.

It was all he could do to stay away from the wreck until nightfall. Being around people again after so long makes him antsy, doubly so seeing the half-familiar faces that populated his childhood. None of them recognized him, of course. He barely remembers the town of Alliance; Alliance does not remember him at all. Except, perhaps, for this charred outline of a house.

Half an oak tree stands in front of the wreckage, its branches now thick blackened stubs. He remembers flowers on the front porch—his mother always let him help water them, even though the watering can was too big for his hands and more water wound up on his shirt than in the pots. But the flowers are gone, the only trace empty pots seared black with heat and ash. The front windows lie in scattered pieces on the ground.

Police tape strings across the open space where the front door used to be, as if that could stop anything that wanted to get in. Jesse ducks under it and goes in the house, sweeping his newly-acquired light across crumbling walls.

Inside, ashes still hang thick in the air, and Jesse coughs with every new puff his footsteps kick up. The furniture in the living room is charred; the furniture in the kitchen beyond is all but gone. But when the light's beam falls across the refrigerator, Jesse catches sight of a singed shopping list still tacked to the front in his mother's neat cursive. He swallows hard.

The Turners died with no idea they'd once had a son. Jesse didn't take anything with him, and he made damn sure not to leave anything behind, not even memories. His parents were supposed to live together until they were very old, and die peacefully in their sleep. He'd left to protect them. Now there aren't even bodies.

He drags a hand over his eyes, heading past the stairs —

—and something stops him. Heart dropping like a stone, Jesse looks up.

Spread across what's left of the ceiling are the thick blood-brown lines of a devil's trap.

The breath in his lungs seems to freeze. He pushes at the empty air, that strange textureless resistance, praying that this will be the time a trap sees a half-demon and rounds _down_. But no such luck. He can feel his heart beating harder, hear his too-short breaths as he fights the growing wave of panic.

He'll be fine. He'll be _fine_. The house was engulfed in flames early this morning; really it's amazing the ceiling hasn't caved already. A stiff breeze would take it down. And it does look like it might storm soon. Jesse just has to wait for one of those floorboards to snap, that's all, and if there's one thing he's good at by now it's waiting. The other option—the shooting heat he can feel boiling up under his skin, closer and closer to the surface, begging to be let out—this could all be over in an instant, and no one would ever know—

No. Not after last time. _Breathe._

But he can't. The air reeks of sulfur, always the last warning sign before his powers burst out whether he wants them to or not. _Breathe_ , he tells himself again, and he forces himself to count the seconds as he draws air in.

After a long moment, his head clears just enough for him to lower himself to the floor, knees weak. "God _damn_ it," he gasps. The irony does not escape him. He runs a hand back through his hair to unstick it from his face, and leans forward, hugging his knees. He's got to think straight to get out of this trap, and he's got to get out of this trap before whoever drew it comes back. Hunters have never cared much for things like him.

There's a creak from the ceiling and Jesse draws in a quick breath, shutting off his light. His stomach tightens. God, are they still in the house?

"The one last time didn't set any fires. Are you sure this is the same thing?" The voice—young and male—comes from somewhere above him.

A second voice—female, it sounds like—is further away, but moving closer in slow, measured steps. "The omens are. But these people lived here last time; why would it have waited?" She sounds like she's right above him now. Jesse's heart hammers against his ribs; he's almost surprised they can't hear it. What are they talking about? There's another creak from the ceiling as the voice says, "I just feel like there's something we're missing. What if—"

There's a loud crash and a shriek of "Claire!" and then Jesse's laid flat, covered in broken boards, with a hunter on top of him.

Jesse hasn't even untangled himself before he feels the cold edge of a blade against his pulse.

"Who are you?" The girl—Claire—turns him over roughly, and Jesse winces at the light shining down from the ragged hole above, a halo on blonde hair that throws her features into darkness. Her thighs bracket his waist, pinning him to the floor, and the hand snagged in his hair jerks his head back, leaving his neck bared against the razor-sharp edge of her knife.

"Jesse," he chokes. "Jesse Turner."

"Turner?" The grip on his hair doesn't loosen, and she doesn't take the knife away. Her weight's pressing him hard against the floor, and he can feel her breath against his face. "You knew these people?"

He should have given a fake name. He doesn't want to talk about this. "My parents." Jesse's still struggling to draw in air. He squeezes his eyes shut against the light. "They're my parents."

There's a long moment where he's sure she's going to stick that knife through his neck, and part of him doesn't even care. But to his surprise, she backs off and gets to her feet. "I'm sorry." She offers him a hand up.

Jesse takes it, letting out a soft groan as he stands. Having another person and part of the second story land on him cracked a few ribs, and they ache as they heal up. Something must have scraped his leg, because that's stinging too, the familiar feeling of his skin knitting itself back together. His jeans are probably wet with blood. "Thanks," he mutters.

Claire tips her head up to look at her friend. "Ben? You okay?"

"I'm fine, are you?" Jesse can't see Ben's face behind the light he's pointing down at them, but he sounds younger now.

"Yeah. Get down here." Claire stands, already brushing herself off like the fall was nothing, though Jesse can see she's cut up too—and dirty, her blonde hair in a messy braid over one shoulder. Her white tank top is torn near the hem, bloodied in a few places. She twists around, looking at the back of her shoulder, then reaches over and pulls out a splinter the size of a pencil with barely a grimace. Jesse looks away.

There's another devil's trap on the ceiling a few yards away.

Jesse's pulse jumps. Pure luck got him out of the last trap, and he won't be as lucky twice. What are these traps doing in his parents' house? Whatever's trying to draw him out, it knows too much about him.

"Why are you here, Jesse?" Claire asks, drawing his attention back to her. "It's not safe to go walking around in places like this."

"You're the one who just fell through the floor." He glances up at what he can see of the hole. He can hardly tell the trap was there. Telling the truth is a split-second decision; he hopes he won't regret it later. "I want to find whatever burned this house down and kill it."

Ben, a white boy about Jesse's age, appears at the kitchen doorway shining his light directly in Jesse's eyes. Again. "Hell of a fire," he says. "But don't worry, man, I'm sure they'll catch whoever started it."

"You can't honestly think people did this," Jesse says, and the light drops away from his face. He didn't get a clear look at the thing that spoke to him from the mirror, but he of all people should recognize the difference between human and not.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ben's light is directed toward Claire now, and she gives him a look Jesse can't interpret.

"I mean humans would have left the bodies," Jesse snaps. "I'm no expert, but any hunter would know that."

Ben's shoulders loosen at that. "You're a hunter?"

"I know some tricks." In point of fact, the idea of calling himself a hunter makes Jesse want to take a long shower, but he can't raise suspicion around these two. He kicks at a chunk of burnt ceiling that Claire brought down with her. "Never heard of something that does this, but. You two got any leads?"

"Demon," Claire says. He can't see her knife anymore, but the way she stares without blinking unnerves him. "We followed some omens into town, just before this place burnt down. Notice how this place smells like sulfur?"

Jesse only just manages not to wince.

"Fucking demons," Ben mutters, and then he ducks his head toward Jesse. "Sorry about your parents, man."

Jesse shrugs, looking away, and his eyes fall on another trap lying under a half-burnt rug. He's got to get out of here.

"So, hey," he says. It takes a couple tries. "Uh, how about we grab some dinner, swap stories?" Just the thought of spending a second more than he has to with them has Jesse's skin crawling, but they have information he needs and anywhere would be better than here. "I know a place not too far from here. Best burgers in Nebraska."

Ben and Claire exchange another look.

Jesse tries to smile at Claire, and isn't sure what comes out. "It's on me."

Claire raises one eyebrow. "Well, Ben never turns down a burger," she says. "We'll follow you?"

"Actually, I don't have a car," Jesse says, leading them out of the house. Hopefully they'll think his jumpy gaze is just checking for more structural damage. "So if I could catch a ride..."

 

* * *

 

"...chew with your mouth _closed_ , Ben, that's disgusting."

"Sorry," Ben says, around a mouthful of burger. He doesn't look very sorry, and Claire huffs.

"So you came here following omens?" says Jesse, ignoring the pickle seed on Ben's upper lip.

"Oh, yeah!" Ben gets out an iPad out, tapping it a few times. "We're pretty sure they have something to do with your house burning down," he says, still chewing. "There have been omens like this here before."

Jesse knocks his drink back with ease of practice, wishing this place had something stronger than beer. Maybe after this he'll find a bar. It's his twenty-first birthday, after all, and so what if he's been legally drinking in Australia for years and the alcohol barely affects him anyway? He deserves some hard liquor. Both his parents died today. "Well, what kind of omen?"

Claire pops a fry in her mouth and glances over at Ben. "You had the weather reports."

Ben frowns down at his iPad. "Gimme a sec."

Claire and Jesse sit in silence for several seconds as Ben types something else in. From the way Claire finally sighs, this isn't unusual. "I know how you feel about people being wrong on the internet, Ben, but if we could return to fighting evil?"

Ben looks up, something wary taking root behind his eyes when he looks at Jesse. Jesse fights down the urge to bolt. "I—" He pauses. "...yeah."

Claire gives him a long look, then rests her chin in one hand. "Electrical storms, temperature drops, cattle mutilations..."

Jesse files the information away. By design, he doesn't tangle with demons, and he's not sure how well he could track omens like that. He wonders if his own powers leave a trail. "And is it still here? The omens, have they stopped?"

"It might very well be," Claire says. "But three years ago, when a demon came to this town last time, the omens kept popping up for almost a month before they faded. Sticking around or just a really powerful demon, we can't know for sure."

"Last time." Jesse's burger feels too thick in his mouth, tastes like cardboard. He clears his throat. "You got a date?"

"Three years ago to the day," Ben says. "Why? That mean something to you?"

Jesse takes another drink—a longer one. His eighteenth birthday is not one he likes to remember.  "S'when I moved out. Thereabouts. Don't really remember." He can feel the familiar panic clawing at his chest, threatening to escape, and he does his best to keep his face blank. "Aren't you a little young to be hunting that long?"

"I've known about this stuff since I was a kid," Ben says, and Jesse doesn't miss the note of pride in his voice.

Jesse looks at Claire. She raises her eyebrows.

"That's when you moved to...Australia?" she guesses. At Jesse's cautious nod, she adds, "Your accent's pretty strong for only having lived there three years."

Ben scowls. "He's not Crocodile Dundee, Claire."

Jesse spent months practicing his pronunciation and swapping out vocabulary until he could blend into any town in Australia; now it's so familiar to him that he hadn't realized he was still speaking that way until she pointed it out. "I was going to uni in Melbourne. Kind of picked it up." He neglects to tell Ben that he has, in fact, killed a crocodile. Wasn't a very good meal anyway.

Claire taps her pinky against her mouth. "So when did you get back?"

_He sees his parents in quick flashes, shock to anger to terror to the bloody streaks across their throats like smiles. He can smell the smoke, feel the flames licking at him, and then that face in the mirror—_

_He wakes to the dry summer air of the southern Outback, surrounded by nothing and no one for miles. But he can be halfway around the world with a thought._

_He goes._

"Not soon enough," Jesse mutters, and then, louder, "I came as soon as I knew." He thinks about eating the rest of his fries, but he's not hungry anymore. "You two about done?"

"I'll get a box for mine," Ben says, still watching him.

Jesse takes his wallet out of his back pocket and makes a show of opening it to look inside. It's empty, save for a small picture he's careful not to let them see. "Damn," he says. "Don't have any American money." He gives them both the most charming grin he can muster. "Think I saw an ATM outside, though."

"We'll wait," Ben tells him, getting his iPad back out.

Jesse ducks out the front door and strolls straight past the ATM. Claire seems smart enough, but Ben's probably gonna play with his iPad for at least ten minutes before he realizes Jesse's stuck them with the bill, and that's more than enough time to get away.

Dinner with hunters. He never expected _that_ to happen again. Jesse quickens his step, his mind already back on his old house and the demon that burned it down.

 

* * *

 

He's almost out of the parking lot when he passes a woman smoking under a streetlight. Cold prickles underneath his skin as he passes her, and he almost mistakes it for the weather—after all, he was quite young the last time he met a demon. But there’s nothing else quite like that feeling. Jesse slows to a stop, heart pounding.

"I was wondering if you'd feel it," the demon says quietly. She puts out her cigarette and looks up, her eyes glowing sulfur-yellow. "Jesse Turner. You have no idea how long I've waited to meet you."

He takes two unsteady steps back. If she knows his name—this must be the demon he saw in the mirror, the one who killed his parents. His powers rear up in vengeance but he pushes them aside, reaches instead for the knife tucked under his sweater.

Her hand catches his wrist, squeezing so hard Jesse feels the bones crunch together. He cries out and tries to jerk away, but she's stronger than he is, willing to call on powers he won't. He _won't_.

"Easy," the demon says. "We need to talk, Jess. There's a thing or two you should know."

"Like what?" Jesse gasps. It _hurts_ ; his jagged bones poke through his skin, blood dripping down onto the sidewalk. Jesse's dizzy, half ready to pass out, and his heartbeat stutters under her hand. What is she doing to him?

The bell above the diner's front door rings. Jesse and the demon both look up.

"I told you we couldn't trust him, I can't _believe_ that fucker stuck us with the bill—"

"It's not like that's your credit card."

"It's the principle of the thing!"

The last thing he needs is for hunters to want to beat money out of him now. But it's too late; they've turned the corner and seen him. "Hi," Jesse tries.

Claire's eyes go from his face to the blood on the sidewalk beneath him, then back up to the gleaming yellow eyes of the woman holding his wrist. "I see you found the demon," she says.

The demon squeezes Jesse's wrist even harder, and the world spins around him. "It's a gift," he manages.

The demon's not smiling anymore. "This isn't your fight," she says to the hunters. "Keep walking."

Ben reaches in his own coat and comes out with a pistol. "These are salt rounds," he warns.

Jesse groans. " _Please_ just leave."

"You're as annoying as your dad," the demon snarls at Ben. The leash in her other hand catches fire and burns away. Jesse takes his eyes off of her long enough to glance at what's stepping out of the shadows, what was at the other end, and freezes.

It almost looks like a dog, a big one, but it's more like the _idea_ of a dog, hastily assembled out of parts that don't quite fit together: slimy oil-black skin that twists over extra joints, fangs longer than Jesse's forearm, a forked tongue lolling almost to the ground and too many eyes rolling madly in its broad head. The smell of corpses rolls toward Jesse with every eager breath the thing pants as the ground scorches under its clawed feet.

The hellhound lets out a howl that makes Ben and Claire jump. "What—"

"Look out!" Jesse says, but it's too late: the dog jumps on Ben and he screams. More of them are skulking out of the shadows. Panicked, Jesse manages to free his knife and lashes out at the demon's arm, scoring a hit deep enough that she lets him go. Wrist throbbing, he backs out of reach, the knife held between them. "What the hell do you want with me?"

"I told you, we need to talk," says the demon. "Since your friend here decided to interrupt, I'll settle for his intestines on a stick."

"He is _not_ my—"

Ben screams again as the hellhound's claws dig into his skin. He's fighting the dog like a wild animal himself, thrashing around and just barely holding off those awful teeth. _Just run_ , Jesse tells himself, _let him go, let him die, it's no skin off your back—_

"Get your car!" he shouts at Claire, and moves toward the hellhound, drawing his knife out with his uninjured hand. His slice goes deep but doesn't cause any visible damage; the dog howls in rage, backing off of Ben and snapping at him instead. Jesse kicks its slavering jaw shut, which stuns it enough that he can drag Ben away from it. "C'mon," Jesse says, hauling Ben to his feet and both scrambling to get to the truck parked three spaces away, Ben's chest dripping blood. Claire's already behind the wheel and revving the engine.

Another hellhound slinks forward, blocking the passenger door. Ben keeps going, almost straight into the thing, until Jesse grabs him and pulls him back. The hellhound snarls, and Ben flinches, eyes shifting wildly. "The back, come on," he says.

Jesse doesn't need telling twice. "Drive!" he shouts at Claire, using the back tire to jump into the truck bed and tugging Ben up after him. Ben grunts in pain as the motion sends blood pulsing from the gashes the hellhound left on his shoulders. Claire whips the truck around, narrowly missing the demon herself, and Jesse lands flat on his ass. By the time he gets his bearings enough to sit up, they're doing at least sixty.

But there's no mistaking the baying of the hounds, the stink of sulfur as they give chase. They're practically _flying_ , skittering and undulating in ways physics was never meant to accommodate. The road starts to crack behind them where the dogs' paws pound against the asphalt. Can they even be stopped? Will he have to make them?

"Shit!" Ben opens a toolbox in the back of the truck; it's full of weapons. He gets out a rifle and loads it. "You know how to use this?"

Grateful, Jesse grabs the rifle and aims it at the nearest hellhound. "I'll figure it out!" He fires just as Claire takes a sharp right turn, and between that and the kickback, he's nearly thrown off the truck.

"Careful!" Ben doesn't spare him a second look as he fires his own gun. The recoil doesn't faze him at all, but he can't aim for shit. The hound is so close; how could he possibly miss it?

Jesse grits his teeth and raises his rifle, aims right at the dog's face, squeezes the trigger. The recoil's still a hard punch against his shoulder, but he keeps his balance this time. The dog screams and stumbles, falling behind its companions and out of sight. Jesse slumps with relief. Weapons work.

"Nice shot," Ben says.

"There are more." Jesse takes aim again and fires, disabling another dog, and another. The hounds are close enough that his bad aim doesn't matter, and thankfully the ones he shoots don't come back. He counts nine of them before the smell of sulfur fades and the roiling bodies vanish back into the twilight. Ben hasn't hit a single one.

 

* * *

 

It's a long time before Ben finally knocks on the back window of the truck, motions for Claire to pull over. She brakes hard and opens the door, jumping out and coming over to the back of the truck. "Ben? How bad is it?"

"Flesh wound," Ben says, but when he slides out of the truck bed he sways dangerously. His entire shirt has gone sodden and dark from the clawmarks on both shoulders.

"Liar," Claire says. "Those need stitches. Take your shirt off."

"Yes _ma'am_ ," Ben jokes, but it's easy to see he's exhausted. Claire just rolls her eyes and grabs the first aid kit. The cloth sticks to Ben's skin as he eases it over his head, his bare shoulders gruesomely bloody, and Jesse dangles his feet off the back of the truck, morbidly fascinated.

"Augh," Ben says as Claire swabs disinfectant over the cuts. "Fucking hellhounds. Are they still coming?"

Claire looks down the road behind them, takes a deep, slow breath. She's quiet for a long moment before she finally says: "I don't think so. Can't hear them if they are." She pulls out a needle and what looks like fishing line. "Light this for me," she adds to Jesse, shoving a box into his hands, and Jesse has a horrible moment of _how did she know_ before realizing that they're matchsticks.

Oh. He pulls one out. Striking it alight on the box takes him a few tries, but it's not that hard. Guiltily he thinks of all the times he let himself start some kindling with his fingertips just because it was easier. The more he uses his powers, the closer he gets to that...thing in the parking lot. He won't let Oliver be right. To Claire, he holds out the tiny flame.

"Thanks." Claire runs the needle through the fire several times and deftly threads it, then sets to work. Ben curses a lot and mostly watches his skin being pulled back together, so he misses how much tension lets out of Claire's shoulders when she's finished. Looks like exasperation isn't the only emotion she can feel for him after all.

Ugh. Jesse is tired, he's sore, and he's on the run from a demon. He does not care about these hunters and their romantic problems. Jesse climbs out of the back of the truck, dropping the gun behind him. "Thanks for the lift."

"Where are you going?" Ben asks him, and Jesse doesn't miss that Ben's still holding a rifle. "You don't even know where we are."

"I'll manage," says Jesse, walking further down the road. It's not like he hasn't slept on the ground before.

"You're _walking_."

"Have been since I was a kid," Jesse says. "It's quite easy once you get the hang of it." His wrist is as healed as it's going to get—crooked, naturally, but he's not gonna rebreak it in front of a couple hunters who'd want to know how it healed so fast in the first place. He's just glad the sleeves of his sweatshirt are long and baggy.

"They're hellhounds," Claire says, firmly enough that he slows. "I don't know what sort of monsters you've seen, but once one of them gets your scent, it will never stop coming for you."

"I've seen _plenty_ of monsters," Jesse snaps, and he isn't talking about hellhounds.

"You don't have any weapons," Ben points out. "How are you going to fight something you can't see?"

Jesse turns around. "What d'you—" But he catches himself and stops. So humans can't see them? No wonder Ben was such a terrible shot. He's lucky he hasn't given himself away already. "I can muddle through," he says. _I don't need weapons_ isn't going to do him any favors.

"I know a place we can hole up," Ben says, bracing himself on the side of the truck. "Safest place in the world."

He gives the least apologetic smile he can muster. "I'm fine alone, thanks." After three years in the desert Jesse knows this to be true.

"That's too bad," says Claire. "We could probably help you track down that demon."

Jesse's smile drops. "You told me everything you know."

"Not everything," says Claire.

That's a damn dirty trick. But he hasn't seen a demon in ten years, and he has no idea how to track one. Even with his powers—but he's not going to use his powers. And without them, these two might be the best shot he has at finding this thing.

Still. They're _hunters_. He knows what happens when hunters find out what he is. He'd trusted Oliver, too, at first.

"Look," Ben says, with a sidelong glance at Claire. "Just come with us to someplace safe for the night. We can talk more in the morning."

On the other hand, if Ben or Claire gets tired enough, they might let something slip about the demon. They know what it did last time. He can't believe it's coincidence that a demon came calling for him exactly three years ago, as he was spending his eighteenth birthday—

"One night," Jesse says. Claire and Ben exchange a look, and Claire gives a tiny nod.

"We're still in Nebraska," she announces, turning back to the truck and opening the door. "Just outside of Crookston, I think."

"Not too far, then." Ben gets in the driver's seat and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Keys?"

"I'll drive." Claire shoves him lightly. "You get some sleep."

"Thanks." Ben slides across to the passenger's side and slumps against the door. When Jesse hesitates, Claire gives a sarcastic flourish to the open door.

"I think I'll just stay in the back," Jesse says, trying to sound nonchalant. Bad enough that he has to share one bench seat with two hunters; now he's gonna get stuck between the two?

"Don't be ridiculous," Claire says, beginning to look irritated. "There's plenty of room, and you'd freeze out there. Just get in and let's go."

He still isn't happy, but without the panicked adrenaline of a hellhound chase, Jesse is noticing just how much colder it is here—while Australia's summer will hold for another several weeks at least, America's spring has only barely begun. He tugs his sweatshirt a little tighter and climbs into the truck. He shouldn't give them another reason to be suspicious, anyway.

Claire hops up next to him and shuts the door, turning the engine back on. Jesse takes a deep breath and shakes off the instinctive claustrophobia. "Where are we going?" he asks, but it's not Claire that answers, it's Ben.

"South Dakota," he murmurs, eyes already closed. "Sioux Falls."

 

* * *

 

The sun's rising by the time Claire pulls the truck off the highway, but with the dull rainclouds hanging overhead, the morning offers little light or warmth. At first Jesse feigned sleep to put off Claire's attention, but somewhere along the way he fell into an uneasy doze, images of fire and black eyes haunting the edges of his mind.

He swims back to consciousness but doesn't open his eyes. Ben and Claire seem not to have noticed, Ben directing Claire from Jesse's other side. It's quiet save for the rain pelting against the windshield and the wipers flicking the water off. Then: "He wasn't lying about all of it," Ben says softly. "Wherever he came from, those were his parents."

"That doesn't mean he's not dangerous," Claire whispers, and Jesse tenses. "Seeing your parents die brings that out in people."

"Yeah, okay, I didn't say I trusted the guy," Ben says. "But I'm not letting him get eaten by hellhounds, either."

What the hell is that supposed to mean? The only reason to protect someone you don't trust is because you want something from them, but so far Jesse has no idea why Ben, or Claire, have insisted on keeping him around. Just thinking about it makes him restless enough that he pretends to wake up lest he be caught faking. The others blink innocently back at him. "We there yet?" Jesse finally says, scrubbing his hair back into order.

"Little farther," Ben says. They keep going, past the neatly mowed lawns and well-lit shops of the town, onto a narrow back road. Claire has to turn the brights on, and when she does Jesse spots a rusted chain-link fence in the gloom. Their tires splash through the ankle-deep puddles on the long unpaved road, kicking up mud and dirt onto the side of the truck.

They finally pass under some kind of rusted archway, and Jesse squints up at the words _Singer's Auto Salvage_. "The safest place in the world is a junkyard?"

"Yup," Ben says with quiet confidence. "No demon's even gonna make it past that gate."

Jesse twists around to look at the gate, already several feet behind them. He doesn't like what that says for their chances.

The truck pulls up in front of a ramshackle old house, and Claire cuts the engine. Ben opens his door, letting in a rush of cool air, and jumps out into a puddle. "When I said I wanted a shower, this was not what I meant," he says, shielding his eyes with his hand and glancing up at the sky. Jesse looks up too, wondering if his own trepidation has anything to do with the gathering clouds. At least the rain isn't his fault; with so much fire whirling inside him he's never been able to wish down a single drop.

"The back door's probably easier to break in, but watch your step," Ben says, grabbing a duffel bag from the back of the truck and handing a backpack over to Claire. "Holy-water sprinklers are one thing but I don't wanna set off any of the booby traps involving silver bullets."

The only reason Jesse doesn't bolt right then is because Claire and Ben are suddenly both holding guns. "Who the fuck lives here?" he hisses.

"Lived," says Ben, but he doesn't elaborate.

They trek through the mud around to the side of the house. Rusted-out shells of cars lean against one another everywhere, piled five or six high in some places. Perfect for hiding in, if it weren't for the hunter's traps that are probably rigged to blow if a demon so much as touches one. Jesse keeps his gaze firmly on the ground ahead of him, hyperaware of Claire's eyes on his back, and steps only where Ben's feet have already gone.

"Here," Ben says when they get to the back door, dropping his duffel on the rotting wood of the back stoop. The door doesn't open when Ben tries it—not that Jesse expected it to, if whoever lived here is as paranoid as Ben says—but Ben doesn't seem fazed. Instead he pulls out a bundle of thin metal objects, and within minutes his lockpicks yield the distinctive click of an opened door.

"Awesome," Ben says, going through the door. "Now we should—"

A bucket of water upends itself onto Ben's head.

"Son of a _bitch_ ," Ben splutters. It covers Jesse's flinch—that's gotta be holy water, though luckily his sweater is baggy enough that none of the splashes soaked through to his skin. He's frozen just outside the doorway, watching it drip off Ben's nose. Then Claire laughs, full and clear, and Ben stops cursing and swiping at his hair to watch, smiling at her like he just can't help himself.

So that's how this is, Jesse thinks. Useful to know someday, maybe, but right now he's more concerned with getting out of this death trap and away from these hunters he's stuck following into it. Even though his panic, though, he has to admit that Claire's laugh is...nice. He hadn't ever expected to hear it.

"Yeah, yeah, next one's going on you," says Ben, but the look on his face is so dopily fond that Jesse's a little embarrassed for him. It's easy to let Claire cross the threshold ahead of him when she's still snorting at Ben's soggy everything. For a second he thinks about just making a break for it, risking the booby traps in the yard and praying one of those junkers has been salvaged enough to work, but then Ben shares his smile with Jesse and says "Come on, man, I'm pretty sure there was just the one," and further hesitation would be far too suspicious. Jesse takes a breath and walks across the puddle, thankful that the Simms brothers had at least given him boots with thick soles.

It's the kitchen, looks like, with faded green wallpaper and a cheap folding table against the other wall. There's no light fixture, and the light coming through the windows is dim, but Jesse can see phones lined up along the wall with label taped on the backs: Federal Marshall. FBI. "Health Department?"

"Hunters don't exactly stay on the right side of the law," Ben says. "Used to be, send the cops calling to Bobby and you'd save yourself a lot of paperwork." He thumps the counter affectionately. "I used to spend every summer here, learning the ropes."

From the state of the cobwebs, no one's lived here for months, maybe years. "What happened to him?"

"Something with claws." Ben stays still for a moment, then lifts a hand to the deep gouges on his shoulder. Jesse shudders at the memory of the hellhound that made them.

"We should get that bandaged up properly," Claire says after a moment. Ben shakes himself and turns around.

"Right. Okay." He crosses to the light switch on the wall and gives it a few flips, but the lights stay off. Ben sighs. "Guess three years of not paying the electricity bills will do that. Jesse—"

"What?" Jesse pretends he hasn't been checking the room over for other traps.

Ben raises his eyebrows. "There's some lanterns in the basement. Can you go grab them?"

Walking into a hunter's basement in the dark while a storm blows outside. If monsters made horror movies, this is how all of them would start. "I can't," Jesse says. "I lost my—" He almost says _torch_ , but remembers Claire's comment about his accent and switches at the last second to "—flashlight."

"You can use mine," Claire says, pulling it out of her backpack. Ben is rifling through the kitchen cupboards, which contain more salt than Jesse has ever seen in one place. Ben stretches a little too far and winces; Claire's mouth tightens. "I'll go get the first aid kit."

She leaves, walking right across the holy water like she doesn't even notice it. Jesse stands against the wall and watches Ben pull down canisters of salt until Ben notices that he's still there. "Do you want me to go with you?" Ben asks.

"No," Jesse says, because the only thing worse than wandering a hunter's house alone is wandering one with a hunter right behind you to see your skin steaming. "I just, uh, where exactly _is_ the basement?"

"Oh! Duh. It's right down the hall there, the door next to the stairs." Ben points. "I think the lanterns are towards the back. Just don't touch any weapons or boxes with symbols on them. Assume it's all loaded."

"Right," Jesse manages, and keeps his back to the wall until he's in the front hallway.

There's another door here, and past the porch he can see that it's started to rain. Not his kind of storm after all. If he goes now, Ben and Claire might not notice he's missing for long minutes, maybe even hours. Much as he wants to kill that demon, he's no closer to finding it now than he was when he got in that truck, and it's rapidly becoming too dangerous for him to stick around in hope of some possible future help.

He nearly steps onto the doormat before he notices the edge of a chalked circle peeking out from underneath it.

 _Shit._ He should have expected that; he should be glad there was only holy water at the back door. Are there other ways out of this house? The wind throws rain up against the windows, whistles through the cracks in the walls, and Jesse hugs himself, wet and cold. He belongs in the desert, where humanity is scarce and hunters even scarcer, where the sun-baked sand would just now be getting cool enough to lie on as the Southern Cross shone out clear overhead—

He stumbles, and the walls re-solidify around him, heat fading under his skin. Jumping usually takes so much effort that he almost didn't recognize it starting, and doesn't like to consider where he might have dropped himself without paying attention. Using his powers unconsciously now? What is wrong with him? He hasn't been this out of control since the Simmses' shack, and he doesn't want to think about the similarities this house has to that place because this could so easily end the same way. Jesse grits his teeth and edges around the trap. He's going to find the basement and get more light and he's going to be fine. The rain drums down above him, coldly reassuring.

The basement smells like mildew. Jesse has to brush away cobwebs as he reaches the base of the stairs. He shines Claire's light around, noting a barred window near the ceiling and several desks covered in the sorts of books you need three dead languages to read. Further down are some of the boxes Ben warned him about, some so strong that Jesse can actually feel them buzzing. He gives them wide berth as he picks his way deeper into the basement, looking for lanterns.

There are weapons, and weapons, and more weapons, packed in around jars of mysterious substances and the kind of hunting library Elias would've killed for. It's wasted on Jesse, who has changed his mind and would rather be with the hunters in a room he can see clearly than down here flinching at every menacing shape at the edge of the flashlight's beam. If he can't find the lanterns, though, upstairs will soon be no better; the dim light outside is already fading.

Finally he spots something: an open metal door, oval like the escape hatch of a submarine, and beyond that a table with two camping lanterns on it. Perfect. Jesse hurries over to the door and through it. The floor feels gritty under his feet, and the air in here is colder, more humid. He puts his light down on the table, presses the switch on the lantern, and the whole room lights up.

Unease skitters up the back of Jesse's neck. Someone's pasted a pin-up over walls that seem to be pure metal, and the stacks of bottled water and canned food are reasonable enough, but the cot in the corner comes with _handcuffs_. The rain sounds louder in here. Jesse peers up at the hole in the ceiling and sees a fan slowly rotating behind a grate shaped like—

He throws himself back against the wall, which means it missed him this time; thank God it's so small. He's _got_ to get out of here. He grabs the lantern off the table and flat-out runs for the door—

—and slams into the empty air, sending himself reeling back. The lantern swings wildly in his hand, shadows jumping all around him. Slowly, Jesse looks down at the floor.

Devil's trap.


	2. Chapter 2

"Jesse!"

Jesse can barely hear Ben calling him over the roaring in his ears. He can't move, his eyes stuck on the symbols under his feet, his mind stuck on Oliver and Elias and all the other hunters they'd called in when they found out what he was. His airway locks up around his too-fast breath and his heart feels like it's going to burst out of his ribcage but it can't, it's trapped just like him.

"Jesse?" comes Ben's voice again, closer this time, but it's only when Jesse smells sulfur that he manages to snap himself out of it. He sits at the desk, facing away from the door, some part of him already resigned to what's about to happen. He would give anything to disappear from this place, but his powers can't take him anywhere while he's in a trap and he's never managed invisibility long enough to help him now. And he should know by now that his powers will only make everything so much worse. He counts his breaths, one-two-three _in_ , one-two-three _out_ , and tries not to notice the scrabbling blankness in his mind where a plan should be.

"Hey, you found some," Ben says, stepping into the room behind him. The lantern casts his shadow large against the wall. Jesse doesn't turn around. "Pretty awesome room, right?" Ben's voice echoes around the empty space; he sounds so damn _proud_. "Solid iron walls, completely coated in salt. A hundred percent ghost, demon, and hellhound-proof."

It's one thing to step into a trap; it's another entirely to be locked in a hunter's prison. At least the shack had been impromptu, something the Simms family cobbled together only after they caught him. This place was _crafted_  for things like him, and even with everything Jesse's got, hunters know how to hurt him, how to make him helpless. He can't burn his way out of iron and concrete. He clenches his hands in his lap so Ben doesn't see them shaking.

"I wonder why Bobby didn't come here, when he was attacked," says Claire, and any notions Jesse had of overpowering Ben vanish. He hates that she's quiet enough to have entered without him noticing, but if he turns around he just knows his face will give him away. He keeps staring fixedly at the desk in front of him.

"He probably didn't have time," Ben says quietly. He clears his throat. "Come on, let's go back upstairs."

And Jesse knows he can't hide this, but he tries anyway. "You guys go ahead," he says, and if his voice is higher-pitched than usual, at least it holds steady. "I'm gonna stay down here."

"You want to hang out in Bobby's paranoid-hunter mancave?" Ben says. "The pin-up isn't _that_ hot."

A book lies open on the desk in front of him, and Jesse gets a flash of inspiration. "I was reading some of this stuff," he says. "I'll be up when I finish."

Claire's hand comes down on the open book—obscured by his own shadow and written, now Jesse notices, in a language that is not English. Despite his better judgment, he looks up at her. She leans in.

"Why are you lying?" she asks, not angry, just quiet and calm and utterly assured of herself. Her dark blue eyes could pierce to the core of him.

"I'm not," Jesse says, exactly like a liar would. He scrambles for another response. "He said this room was hellhound-proof, right? I w—I _want_ to stay here."

The stutter gave him away, he knows it even before Claire says, "No you don't." Jesse pushes the chair backwards and stands up but Claire follows him, her expression blank.

"You don't want to be here at all," she continues, taking an unhurried step forward every time he moves away. "But you weren't lying when you said you _would_ be staying here."

"Goddammit, I knew it." Ben joins her, coming at him from the other side, his body blocking the light on the table. "Did you know that there is no such person as Jesse Turner? I checked the records, when we met you. The people who died in that house didn't have a son." Jesse doesn't realize what they're doing until his back is to the tauntingly open door.

Ben's got a gun in his hand, not raised but ready to be. Claire hasn't gone for a weapon yet, calm as ever when she nods to the empty air behind him. "Just step outside and we'll call it my mistake."

The blood pounds louder than ever in his ears and in his hands, telling him to eliminate the threat. Jesse clenches his jaw and hopes Ben's a clean shot. "No."

Jesse's braced for a bullet, so he's not at all ready for Ben to slap his free hand against Jesse's chest and _shove_. His teeth click together with the impact when thin air won't let him through. Ben's fingers curl, suspicions confirmed. Jesse tries to pull him off, but something on Ben's wrist burns when he touches it and he lets go, startled and scared.

"That's palo santo, you demonic son of a bitch," Ben grunts, digging his fingers in harder. "Burns hellspawn on contact."

Jesse's never even heard of palo santo. The Simmses hadn't either. Every time he thinks he knows everything that can hurt him, someone comes along to teach him something new. Jesse swings his forearm into Ben's elbow, breaking his grip, then pivots and lets Ben's imbalance send him sprawling where Jesse can't go: out.

"Claire, get out of there!" Ben yells, blood dripping from a split lip. Jesse spins, backing up against the wall, but Claire darts past him and out without trying to engage. He backs up even further, away from the two of them at the door—but, of course, he has nowhere to go.

"You working with the other one?" Ben demands. His gun _is_ pointed at Jesse, now, and Jesse doesn't understand why he doesn't just shoot. "Was that your plan, she'd sic the dogs on us so you could earn our trust?"

"She killed my parents!" Jesse says. "I want her dead, that's the only reason I'm even here!"

"You don't have parents."

Ben says it so carelessly, so cruelly, that Jesse is stunned silent. Ben means it the way Oliver would have, his earlier words in the truck obviously forgotten— _you're just a monster, monsters don't get families_. But he's right: Jesse doesn't have parents. Not anymore.

Ben says something else, and when Jesse doesn't answer he steps closer, right up to the threshold of this godforsaken room, shaking his gun for emphasis. "I _said_ , where were you three years ago?"

Three years ago. Hah. Jesse's gotten himself back _exactly_ as he was three years ago: stuck in a devil's trap with some pissed-off hunters desperate to kill him. Except this time he's at the beginning, not the end, unchained and minus the bruises but with the whole long ordeal still ahead of him, the silver knives and the holy water and the tangible, unrelenting hatred.

No—it's the day after his birthday now. Three years ago he was dry-heaving in the desert, watching the distant plume of smoke that had yet to dissipate.

"Answer the question," Ben snaps.

Why should he? He's tried before, cooperating; he's tried making himself too useful to kill. It hadn't worked on the Simms brothers. Jesse flinches and hates himself for it when Ben moves closer, actually stepping back into the devil's trap, gun still squarely pointed at Jesse's chest. Hunters only ever see half of him anyway; why draw it out?

"Waste of a bullet," he says, and Ben stops. Jesse takes one small step away from the wall. He can't stop his heart jackrabbiting in his chest, but at least he can know this time he started with a straight back.

"What, shooting you?" Ben starts moving closer again. "I'm not gonna shoot you, not while you're inside that poor kid. And you're not leavin' him until you've answered my question."

Jesse wishes it were as easy as saying an exorcism to get the demon out of him. They do still think he's an ordinary demon, he has to remember that, and they think he knows something they need. He'd rather not disabuse them of either notion. "If you're not gonna shoot me and you're not gonna let me leave, I don't see much incentive."

Suddenly there's a flask in Ben's other hand, and the water splashes cold across Jesse's face for a second before it bites into his skin like acid. He yelps and lurches to the side. "But _that_ hurts you, doesn't it?" says Ben, triumphant.

"And what makes you think I can't hurt you?" Jesse yells, bent almost double. He feels drops of holy water clinging to his tightly-closed eyelashes, waiting to blind him if he looks up. "The last hunters that hurt me are _dead_."

"He's not lying," Claire says sharply. "Ben, get out of there."

Ben's still right there, though, when the holy water has sizzled off and Jesse can open his eyes again. "Who?" he asks, his fierce mask slipping a little. "Who did you kill?"

Oliver's face is still as familiar to Jesse as his own, and Elias' not far behind, their matching green eyes and tan skin and sun-blond hair. He wishes he didn't always remember Oliver's smile first, before the ugly turn his mouth took when he'd picked up his machete. "No one you'd know," he tells Ben. "Just a couple of brothers who'd never let a monster go."

He doesn't expect Ben to scream "Son of a bitch!" and slam him bodily against the wall. "Where are they? What did you do to them?"

"They're _dead_!" Jesse shouts. "I killed them, I killed _all_ of them, I burned them to the ground!" His voice cracks on the last word, and he can't look Ben in the eyes anymore.

" _Exorcizamus te,_ " Ben snarls. " _Omnis spiritus immundi, omnis satanica potestas_ —"

"I'm not a demon," Jesse says dully. No use hiding it now.

" _Omnis incursio infernalis adversarii,_ " Ben continues a little louder. His face is very close to Jesse's now, and Jesse can feel each word as Ben says it, hot bursts of air against the same skin he'd burned with holy water. Jesse just looks down at the firm grip Ben's hand has on his shirt. Ben's shorter than him, but stockier, with strength that comes from fighting and not running. The words rattle on, getting more uncertain with every moment Jesse fails to react. When Ben finishes with a demanding " _Audi nos,_ " Jesse finally looks back up.

"I'm not a demon," he repeats.

Ben lets go of him and backs up, raising his gun again. "I'm not an idiot, I know about binding links," he says, but there's raw fear on his face. They always hurt you more when they're afraid of you.

Claire says something much shorter, in a language that barely sounds human, and Jesse feels like every cell of blood in his body just flipped over at once. But he's still right here.

"What are you?" says Claire, coming in to stand beside Ben. "If it's not the devil's trap keeping you here it's the iron, but Fae don't react to holy water like that. You're obviously not a ghost. So what are you?"

He looks at the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder and feels unbearably lonely. "My name is Jesse," he says. "I'm a cambion."

"You could at least try harder than _making things up,_ " says Ben, but Claire shushes him.

"He's telling the truth," she says, and Jesse wonders again how she always sounds so sure.

"Half-demon," he clarifies, for Ben's sake. Might as well give them something to brag to their hunter buddies about when they've finished with him. "I've got—some powers—but I don't use them, I swear I don't. There's no one in here but me."

Claire frowns. It could almost give Jesse hope, that frown, but Ben's got his anger back. "I don't care what you are," he says. "What did you do to the Winchesters?"

For a moment, Jesse's panic recedes in favor of utter bafflement. "What?"

" _Dean,_ " says Ben furiously. "And Sam. You said you killed them, you said—"

"What are you on about?" Jesse says. "I didn't kill them, I don't even know who that is."

As he says it, though, his memory sifts back before the Simmses, before the desert, before any of this, and finds something. _I'm Sam Winchester. That's my brother Dean. We hunt monsters._

Sam, at least, had been honest with him, had told him what he was and why it was so dangerous to do what he could do. But they'd wanted him to fight. They'd said it was his choice, but they wanted him to go with them, probably to some place like this, and be their ace in the hole for a war that seems to have done just fine without him. He didn't want to fight, but he didn't want to be a demon either, so he had run away—and because of Sam and Dean Winchester, he'd left his parents far behind him when he went.

"They're brothers," Ben says. "They're the best hunters in the country, maybe in the world, and three years ago they disappeared without a trace." He leans in. "So what do you know about that?"

Jesse takes a deep breath. "I've been living in Australia since I was eleven years old," he says. "I don't know who the Winchesters are."

"Lying," Claire says quietly, like an order for execution, because this time he is.

Ben's expression hardens. He gestures to the cot with his gun. "Cuff him."

" _Don't,_ " Jesse cries immediately, trying to make it sound commanding and not afraid. He's lasted this long because the trap is a large one, and his feet and hands are free, but he remembers the silver chains that kept him dangling from the roof of the shack like so much meat, cutting into his wrists faster than he could heal himself. Trapping his body tighter will only make his powers harder to control.

Ben lunges for him, but fury makes him sloppy, and Jesse ducks to the side. Claire moves parallel, parrying him back away from the door so he can't cut off their exit route. She doesn't follow it up with an attack, though, and Jesse is disoriented, trying to keep track of her and Ben and the smaller devil's trap on the ceiling that would lock him standing perfectly upright, unable even to dodge a blow. While Jesse's attention focuses on the place Claire's knife isn't, Ben tries again, and this time he catches Jesse's arm.

A spike of adrenaline sends fire rippling under Jesse's skin like a wave, only barely contained by the trap. The floor starts to shake. He hears himself say, "Let. Go." And Ben does.

He staggers a little as the rush fades, his breath coming heavy, but that's nothing to the rapid in-out of Ben's as he stares at Jesse, his eyes saucer-wide. Ben may think himself brave, a gladiator entering the lion's den, but he forgets that no matter how brave the warrior, in the end the lions licked blood off their bones.

"If you touch me again, I will kill you," Jesse says, and he means every word.

Claire steps between him and Ben, a knife poised in her hand. Jesse has no doubt her aim is as lethal as any bullet. "Ben," she says, "get out and don't say another word until you're upstairs."

Ben doesn't argue. Jesse hears his footsteps disappear up the stairs, and then he's alone with Claire. Her steady gaze seems to freeze him in place. For a few long seconds, nobody speaks.

"Have a go then," Jesse says. She knows there's not a human trapped in this body with him. She's seen him do things that even demons can't. She has no reason not to throw the knife. His nerves are strung out almost to their breaking point, waiting for her.

Claire says, "No," and backs out of the room, and locks the door behind her.

 

* * *

 

It's a long night.

At first Jesse takes closer stock of the room, trying to find something he can use as a weapon when Ben and Claire come back. He thinks of turning out the lantern so they won't be able to see, but a while after they leave he hears the belch and rumble of a motor starting up, and then cold fluorescent light buzzes to life in the tiny sliver of basement he can see through the door's window. He shifts a little closer to his lantern, glad he doesn't have to add darkness to this horrible place. What else? Neither the bed nor the desk as barricades will slow them down much when the door opens outward. There's still a smaller devil's trap in the ceiling waiting to snare him if he moves the wrong way. Eventually he realizes that really, it's absurd to consider stabbing them with a pen or hitting them over the head with a book. He's the deadliest weapon in this room.

His thoughts soon turn to wondering what exactly they'll do to him. Ben seems like a man of simple tastes; it'll probably be awhile before the appeal of holy water wears off for him. Claire's harder to guess. Maybe she'll use that knife of hers to try cutting devil's traps directly into his skin; one of the Simms cousins took until the third day to come up with that. Maybe she'll want to hit him with her own two hands like Elias, nice and visceral. Or maybe she'll be like Oliver, and just keep swinging and swinging a machete at his neck, hoping this will be the time his head comes off.

Jesse drops onto the cot, trying to control his breathing. The handcuffs clink. How much longer does he have before he'll be chained down here? Quickly he rebreaks his wrist, muffling a curse, and sets it properly. The joint pops as it heals straight this time. No sense giving them a head start.

But he can't use his powers this time. He needs to promise that to himself, because if he doesn't this is just going to be history repeating itself and he can't—he can't let that happen again. He takes a deep breath, trying to ease the pressure around his lungs. He won't let himself be what the hunters think he is. Not again.

Some time later Jesse jerks awake, appalled that he could have fallen asleep even in a place like this. It's morning now, sunlight streaming down through the hole in the ceiling and washing out the lantern's glow. He's too used to the rocky ground of the desert, too used to the poisonous things that sleep in the same shady places that he does while the sun beats down overhead. Constant panic is exhausting, and he should have guarded against that; sitting down on the soft cot, even with Ben and Claire out of sight for the moment, had been a mistake.

He stands up, starts pacing. He tries to judge from the light what time it is, but he can't see any horizon, can't concentrate on figuring it out when he's staring up at that unshakeable trap. All he knows is that the sun has risen past the pink of first light. They might come back for him at any time.

His power simmers a little hotter at that thought, and he tries again to shove it down; that tingling behind his eyes hasn't fully faded since he jumped to Nebraska. But he's been catching his own meals for the past three years and he knows how to kill things with just his bare hands. Human beings aren't so different from jackrabbits, right? If he's careful, if he keeps a cool head and doesn't let them scare him, he might be able to escape without using his powers again.

Jesse slumps against the wall. Sure. If he can stop being scared. But when was the last time that happened? He's been looking over his shoulder and waiting for the other shoe to drop since Sam Winchester explained what a cambion was. A thing like him's not supposed to exist, and the world makes sure to remind him of that whenever he starts to forget.

Footsteps creak on the stairs outside, and another rush of adrenaline sends Jesse's body back into overdrive. How could he not be scared? Just because he can't be killed doesn't mean it won't hurt when they try. They've had all night to plan, to find the supplies he's sure this house has, maybe even time to find some obscure piece of lore that can finish the job after all.

No, he's not that lucky. He doesn't want to die, but even more than that he doesn't want it to _hurt_ , and the Simms family made damn sure he knew how little he can truly withstand. It's not _fair_ , he hasn't hurt anyone this time, he just wanted to save his parents but he couldn't even do that, and now he's going to be stuck in this cage until these hunters are past dead, maybe forever.

For the first time in years, Jesse thinks, _I want to go home._

The lock on the steel door slides open, and then Claire appears in the doorway. She steps inside, carrying a bowl of something, and does at least grant him the courtesy of pretending not to notice Jesse hurriedly wiping his eyes on the sleeves of his sweatshirt.

"Pork and beans," she says, setting the bowl down on the desk. "Everything here is canned." She even manages to make it look natural, how she walks away from the bowl and goes to lean against the wall without ever turning her back on him. The circle of sunlight on the floor lights her face from the bottom up.

"If I'd known there would be room service, I'd've tipped better." His voice is hoarse, a little stuffy from crying. Little wonder she doesn't acknowledge the joke. Jesse shuffles over to the desk to examine the bowl.

It certainly  _smells_  like food. He wonders what she put in it. Poison makes sense for Claire, now he thinks of it—innocuous stillness, a danger hidden until it stops your heart.

Well, he survived the pain and delirium after that taipan snake bit him. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't hungry, with his powers burning energy so much faster than usual and the burgers in Alliance a distant memory. Gingerly, he picks up the bowl, watching Claire's face. When she doesn't react, he grabs the spoon.

Silver. _Fuck._ His fingers spasm before he can fight off the deadening throb of pain, and the spoon clatters to the floor. She definitely saw that.

"I wondered about silver," she says. There's something almost apologetic in her voice. "But you're not likely to find anything else in a hunter's house."

Because that's his concern: cutlery. He's just handed them another weapon. Jesse puts the bowl down and ignores the sad growl of his stomach. "Where's Ben?"

Claire stands a little straighter. "Asleep." She correctly interprets Jesse's expression and adds, "I wanted to ask you a few questions without Ben...overreacting."

Jesse rubs his neck and remembers palo santo. "So you're the good cop, huh?"

Claire’s mouth smiles, and Jesse rapidly begins to reconsider. "I'm the one who knows if you're telling the truth."

So he wasn't imagining it; those weren't just lucky guesses before. With the right questions she could learn in an hour what it took weeks of trial and error for the Simmses to figure out. Jesse's become an accomplished liar by necessity, but whatever she has, he's not good enough to fool it. Could she make him say things, too, things he didn't want to?

"Are you a psychic?" he asks. "A witch?" Psychic would be better; their gifts tend to be passive, not the kind that can actively scramble your mind, or at least that's what Elias told him. Witches can do almost anything with the right materials.

"No," says Claire. "Hearing lies gives me a headache." She tips her head and her braid falls a little further down her shoulder. A pause. "I would rather avoid a headache today."

It's not a threat—she doesn't even raise her voice—but Jesse stands absolutely paralyzed. All thoughts of trying to trick her have fled. He's never been so intimidated by someone in his life.

Claire sits down on the cot. "Those really were your parents, weren't they?"

"Yes." Jesse swallows and tries to get his wits about him. "Yes."

"But you're a cambion, you said." Jesse nods, and Claire asks, "Was one of the Turners possessed?"

"They adopted me," Jesse says, feeling tongue-tied; he's been lying about where he came from for so long that the truth comes out heavy and slow. "My birth mother, she got pregnant by the demon that possessed her, and when I was born she gave me up." He doesn't blame her, not in the slightest. He wouldn't have kept himself either.

"But you left them. The Turners."

"Yes." And he'd thought they'd be safe, he'd thought that with no knowledge of him they wouldn't get caught in the apocalyptic mess he'd been fleeing. He drops his gaze. She'll know it's the truth.

"Why?"

"I found out what I was," he says dully. "The demon that...made me, I guess, it came back. The demons were having a war or something, and they wanted me on their side. So I left." Her expression is blank, judging, and whatever she's thinking she's wrong. "I thought they would be safer without me," he says. "I was eleven years old, I didn't think anything would come after them if I wasn't there, I didn't know they'd need protecting!"

This outburst does little to shake Claire's equanimity. "What happened to the demon?"

"I don't—I don't know." He remembers seeing the black smoke pouring out of Julia's mouth. Remembers wondering if anyone was going to do that to him, because his mom said smoke could choke you. "I told it to get out," he adds, in case _I don't know_ is too much like lying. "It flew out through the fireplace, and I have no idea where it went after that."

Claire frowns a little at that. "You exorcised it?"

Does exorcism mean pulling a demon out of its host, or does it only count if the demon gets sent to Hell? He doesn't want to get it wrong. "I told it to get out of her," Jesse repeats. "Not in Latin, just like that. 'Get out of her.' "

Claire leans forward, not nearly so bored now. "So you can tell demons to leave their vessels, and they listen to you?"

Jesse shrugs uncomfortably. If he had wanted it more, if he'd still had the imperious confidence of a sixth-grader, could he have killed that demon yesterday, right there in the parking lot? "I don't know. That's the only time I've done it." He pauses, then adds, "I don't like demons."

"Could you do it to things that aren't demons?"

Jesse actually takes a step toward her, fascinated by the way her face has changed, the intensity tinged with desperation. He doesn't understand what she's asking him but he wants to say yes.

That thought pulls him up short. She's a hunter, for God's sake, and still pretty bloody terrifying even when she's hopeful. "Like what?" he asks instead. Does she think he can drive the monster out of people after they've sprouted fangs and claws and a new hunger? The Antichrist isn't known for his ability to heal.

Claire, too, seems to realize she's given something away, even if Jesse can't yet decide what it was. She sits back and deliberately relaxes her shoulders. "No one. So you don't know what happened to that demon, or if it's the same one chasing you."

If Jesse were braver he might ask if she gets headaches from her own lies. "I told you, I haven't come back to the States since then," he says. "I don't know what the demons are doing here."

She mulls this over for a while, absently biting her lip, but it's the truth. She nods a little and changes tack. "Tell me what you know about the Winchesters."

Jesse doesn't make the mistake of lying about it twice. "They showed up at the same time the demon did, when I was little. Asked me some weird questions, first, and then they tried to get me to go with them and learn how to fight _against_ the demons." He remembers, briefly, thinking that he was going to be a superhero. He should've remembered that superheroes don't get families either. "That's the last time I saw them."

"Did you kill them?"

"What? No. I left." Left without his parents, because Sam had said it was too dangerous to bring them along. Hunters have caused him nothing but pain from the start.

Claire purses her lips. "Do you know where they are now?"

"No."

She slides off the cot, almost casual in the well-balanced stance she lands in. "So who were the hunters you killed?"

Jesse's pulse picks up again. He can at least take comfort in the unlikelihood that she knew any of the Simmses personally, but hunters are like one big family even when they're not related by blood; to hurt one is to bring down the wrath of all of them. "Just some hunters."

"You're going to have to try harder than that."

He glares at her. "You want their names?" Because he knows all of them, learned from the way the others encouraged whoever was slicing him up at the time, learned to flinch when they offered a turn to Alice with her thin blades, or Uncle Harry with his blowtorch, and always, always for Oliver.

Claire's eyes narrow in scorn. "You knew their names?"

"'Course I know their bloody names, I was running with them for almost a year. Elias and Oliver Simms, scourge of the outback, picking up a stray." Jesse spreads his arms, lip curling. "Didn't stop them from chasing me down like anything else, when they found out what I was. Didn't stop them from calling their whole family in to try and kill me." Claire looks stricken; good. Let her get some taste of his fear. "They never did figure it out," Jesse says viciously. "They tried until I set the whole trap afire and everyone burned up, but not me. I never died. So what makes you think you and your boyfriend can do any better?"

Claire starts to say something, then closes her mouth. Jesse takes a grim satisfaction in having rattled her, even though it'll probably make things worse for him in the end. "So you—" she begins, then shakes her head and tries again. "Was that the only time you killed someone?"

He almost wants to lie, make himself the kind of monster they'd be afraid to even touch, but she'll know. He hedges, "There were some accidents when I was a kid. Then while they were chasing me one of them stabbed me while I was asleep, so—" He cuts himself short. "But whatever, why do you care? I killed a bunch of hunters, that's the part that matters, just—just get on with it already."

For a long moment Claire doesn't do anything at all. Then she crosses the room, and when she passes under the devil's trap the light from the sky above it makes her hair glow halo-gold. She stops right in front of him and looks him in the eyes. Jesse grits his teeth and stares back.

"Did you do it on purpose?"

He frowns and his jaw unclenches a little. "They were trying to kill me," he says, in case she missed that the first time.

She doesn't blink. "Yes or no, Jesse."

It needles him, hearing his own name from her, when she'd been so disgusted at him for knowing the people he killed. He hopes she feels guilty every time he flinches from here on out, because now she knows his name too. Did he do it on purpose? He _should_ have, he _deserved_ to, and for those long minutes when the fire was building and they were still alive enough to scream, he'd been _glad._ "Yes," he says, and has no idea what she hears.

Claire takes a deep breath.

"Stay here," she says, and then she turns around and _leaves_ again, doesn't even close the door this time so he can see all that open space taunting him. He should've known, she's better even than poison; she's going to leave him to rot down here and let his imagination do her work for her.

"Where the fuck am I gonna go?" he yells after her, but she's already at the top of the stairs and she doesn't answer.

 

* * *

 

She must wake Ben up, because Jesse hears muffled voices that quickly turn into a shouting match upstairs. He can't make out a lot of the words, but he picks up enough to catch the gist of the argument: _you went to talk to that thing alone? Yes, and he was too scared of me to do anything about it. Should we kill it? Yes, let's._

He's guessing about that last part. Claire is very strident when defending her ability to look out for herself—and if Ben doesn't believe that, he's stupider than Jesse gave him credit for—but when it comes to the interrogation and what she plans to do about it, her voice drops too quiet for him to hear. Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.

All too soon, he hears the basement door open again, and Ben's sneakers tromp their way down the stairs, accompanied by bitter muttering. Ben crosses the basement out of Jesse's line of sight and clangs around for a while, Claire watching from the bottom of the stairs, then reemerges with a paint can and three dust masks. He stands outside the cage and chucks one of the masks at Jesse.

"What are you doing," Jesse says. Death by paint is a new one, but when it comes to torture he's found that human creativity is boundless.

"Look, just put it on, I don't know how long this is gonna take," Ben says. Claire comes to stand beside him, and he hands her a mask before slipping on his own.

"How long _what's_ going to take?" He looks to Claire when Ben doesn't answer, but behind the mask her face is even more inscrutable. Ben opens the can, kneeling just outside the doorway, and starts dabbing something on the floor across the threshold. Jesse smells the sharp tang of chemicals and sucks in his breath.

"If you try anything, I'm putting it right back," Ben warns, and that's when Jesse sees the label of the can: _paint remover._ Where his brush moves, a red smear follows after, slowly but surely wiping away the outer line of the devil's trap.

Jesse stares at Claire, agape. She shrugs, and looks down.

"What, you're just—just letting me _go?_ " He can almost feel the trap getting weaker, like a band loosening around his chest. Whatever kind of mind game they're playing, he's not smart enough to out-think it. He'll take whatever they spring at him if it means getting out of this cage.

"Are you planning to hurt us?" Claire asks. Ben's brush stills for a moment, though he doesn't look up.

"...No." It's the only possible answer to give them right now, but it's also true; Jesse doesn't plan to slow down long enough to hurt them on his way out of this godforsaken house.

Claire shrugs again, like this is only what she expected. How does she _know?_

Ben gives one last swipe with the paintbrush and then stands up, snapping the mask off his face. There it is: a break in the trap. "All right," Ben says, "come on."

Jesse moves toward the door, slow despite the shaking in his hands and more careful than ever not to pass under the trap on the ceiling. Claire tugs Ben away so he's not standing right in front of the door, and that more than anything either of them have said makes Jesse think maybe this is actually happening. He reaches the threshold and puts a hand out in front of him. It passes through the air without a murmur.

"Shit," Jesse says, and stumbles all the way to the opposite wall before he stops moving.

He's shaking all over now, tiny tremors that he hopes are hidden by the dim fluorescent bulbs along the ceiling. They haven't attacked him yet. He turns around, sees Claire finally removing her mask, and Ben looking rather uncomfortable. Neither of them move toward him.

Whether mercy or strategy, he's not letting this empty space pass him by; now is his chance. Better to use his powers a little bit now than risk them exploding when Ben and Claire take this further. He closes his eyes and concentrates, thinking _take me back, take me back_ , picturing the sun-baked grit and jutting red rocks he'd left half a world behind him. It's going to hurt to jump again, he knows—the vertigo still hasn't entirely faded from his leap to Alliance. But he'd nearly jumped earlier without even thinking about it; wishes he had, now, and spared himself the last nightmarish twelve hours. It doesn't matter that returning to his old house is the first time he's ever teleported and landed on target. The Great Australian Desert is plenty big enough to aim for.

He feels himself slipping sideways, skin heating up, not quite in the basement but not quite anywhere else either—and then a raging wall of cold slams into him and snaps him back into his body and this house in South Dakota. He reels, seasick and punchdrunk, nearly falling on all fours with the force of the shiver that follows that horrible cold.

"What the hell was that?" Ben demands, starting forward, but Jesse drags himself upright through sheer force of will and makes a mad dash for the stairs. "Jesse!" Ben yells after him.

Why couldn't he jump? That didn't feel like failure, not like the rare experiments where his powers just rumble and spit like an engine that won't turn over. This was something else stopping him. He never wants to feel anything like that again. He'll have to escape the human way, steal one of the junkers lying in the yard outside or just run as far as he can before his legs give out. Bursting upstairs, he remembers the trap at the front door in the nick of time, veers into the kitchen instead. The door slams open with the force of his entire body hitting it.

He's free, he's out, for five long strides across the wispy grass he thinks he's going to make it.

Then the chills set in, and Jesse looks up.

Clouds unlike anything he's ever seen roil in the sky above the house. They spark, but not with ordinary lightning; their underside tinges purple like a bruise. Their black is not the color of even the fiercest storms, but Jesse remembers it; it's the color of smoke over a burning fire.

Demons.

They seethe at him and dive, a tornado of glittering malice, and Jesse wants to flee but he can't outrun this, can't survive that blistering chill trying to pass through them. The wind whips his hair back away from his face so he can't hide, so he'll see every moment of their writhing descent until the cloud reaches him.

Then someone's grabbing him, pulling at his arms and his clothes, yelling, "Inside! You have to come inside!" Jesse lets himself be pulled but can't look back, can't look away from the smoke come to claim him at last.

Claire slams the door closed once they're through, already pouring salt as they pass her, and though the demons spatter against the glass like a downpour, they are rebuffed.

Ben drags Jesse bodily to a chair and sits him down, Jesse's eyes still fixed on the door, waiting for the strain to break it. "Hey," Ben says. When Jesse doesn't respond, he grabs Jesse's chin and turns his head to face him. "Hey. You okay?"

Jesse flinches out of the hold, but it forces him to look away from the dark window, up at Ben.

"I'm fine," he says, instinct alone because he is very very not fine at all. And he's still trapped. _Fuck._

"Give him something to eat," Claire says. She's pouring a second ring of salt around the first; Jesse sees another thick line on the windowsill beside him. "He didn't have any of the pork and beans I made earlier and it'll help with the shock."

"You didn't make _me_ breakfast," Ben says, affronted, but Jesse cuts in—

"That wasn't poisoned?"

They both turn to look at him, and he hunches his shoulders a little. Maybe he's still discombobulated from his two minutes of freedom and nearly getting eaten alive by demon smoke, but he thought he'd learned well enough by now that you _never_ draw their attention.

"You thought I was trying to poison you?" Claire says, with a tone that indicates something in her head that hadn't made sense suddenly clicked.

"Dude, why would she be poisoning you?" says Ben.

Jesse gives him an incredulous look. "You seemed plenty keen on shooting me last night." It hasn't escaped his notice that Ben has at least one gun concealed in his coat, though thankfully, at the moment, none in his hands.

"Yeah, but poison is _cheating_."

Ben sounds like he's actually offended on Claire's behalf, much more a grumpy kid than a hunter, and it's that momentary lapse that makes Jesse ask, "So what are you planning to do to me, then?"

Claire shoots Ben a warning look, and Ben turns serious, no doubt remembering the things he'd seen last night and the quieter parts of their argument this morning. The demons outside have stopped shaking the doorframe but they're still there, rolling blackly just beyond the windows. Jesse holds his breath and it feels like the whole world waits with him.

"Well, we're not letting some fucking demon get ahold of you," Ben says finally. "Not these ones and not that bitch we ran into in Nebraska, not until we figure out what the hell's going on here."

A pause, then Claire adds, "We don't intend to hurt you as long as you do nothing worth hurting for."

Carefully worded: the Simmses had thought just _being_ a cambion was worth hurting him for, and there's nothing to say Claire or Ben won't find themselves coming to the same conclusion. Still, it's a damn sight better than Jesse is used to.

"That a deal, then?" he asks carefully. "I don't hurt you, you don't hurt me, no one ends up in devil's traps?"

"I'm not breaking any more," Ben says. Jesse tenses, and he gestures at the windows. "Sorry, man, but we're being trapped by devils right now, and we can't afford to give up that insurance." He fights himself over something for a minute, then sighs. "So uh, you'd better not try to go in the living room."

Jesse's head snaps around because he can't help it, because he'd checked every floor and wall and ceiling as he passed and it was sheer luck that he'd taken the hallway to the basement and not that room. His eyes dart over every surface he can see through the doorway, and he can see nearly all of them, but there's still no sign of a trap, no chalk or paint or even suspiciously circular carpets, but why would Ben lie about this unless—

Ben walks into the living room and flips a switch. A weird purple light comes on—blacklight, Jesse's mind dredges up from his brief childhood—and there on the floor glow green-white lines that circle menacingly across the entire room.

Jesse succeeds, barely, in not throwing up.

"And there's one by the front door, and you already found the panic room," Ben says.

The panic room, Jesse thinks hysterically, is aptly named.

Ben turns that awful light back off and comes back into the kitchen, sitting in the other chair across from Jesse. Jesse can feel the weight of his gaze but doesn't quite look up.

"God, they really freak you out, don't they?" says Ben, not overtly cheerful but not anything else Jesse can name, either.

"Ben," warns Claire.

"No, I just mean, demons always seem like they're more pissed about it than anything, but you look like you're gonna be s—"

"Ben."

He subsides. Jesse sneaks a look at Claire, who seems to be communicating volumes of disapproval at Ben with her eyebrows alone. He's not sure what to make of her defense of him, first in letting him out of the trap—Ben may have held the brush, but he has no delusions about whose idea that was—and now this. He'd be more grateful for it if he knew at what cost it came.

"Demons can be exorcised," Jesse says, his voice still a little shaky. "I can't." It's useless trying to explain to a hunter why even the prospect of Hell might be better than being trapped in one place forever. "But if you want to have a go being stuck in a tiny circle drawn by people who hate you, I highly recommend it. Very therapeutic."

Ben laughs, but when Jesse looks up at him, he can't see any sign of spite there. "You're funny," Ben says, sort of surprised-like, still grinning. And Jesse's been fooled by a pretty smile before, but in spite of his better judgment, he finds himself smiling back.

 

* * *

 

The demons withdraw slightly, enough that Jesse can see some grass out the window instead of pure smoke, but they keep circling like a malevolent hurricane and this house is the eye's dead center.

Every so often Ben or Claire will get up and check the salt lines they'd poured over every threshold and windowsill last night. After one such trip, Ben comes back with a bucket and a rosary, and gives Jesse an almost-apologetic look as fills the bucket with water, then drops in the little cross and begins to chant Latin. When he's done, he carries the bucket out and sets it by the front door, though not before filling four water bottles out of it, two for him and two for Claire. Then, restless, Ben goes to check the salt lines again.

Jesse stays in the kitchen, paradoxically afraid to move in case he finds himself in another trap. When the gurgles of his empty stomach become audible, Claire hands him a bowl, a can opener, and an unopened tin of Spaghetti-Os. He looks up at her, confused, and she drops a plastic spoon into the bowl and walks back out.

Even cold, it's one of the best meals Jesse can remember.

Behind the wall of demons, the daylight slowly fades. Some of the light fixtures work now, thanks to a generator Ben found out back, but he tells them he's not sure how much longer the fuel will last with no one able to go out and refill it. "But there are still some candles," Ben says, "and the lanterns. Jesse doesn't have to get them this time."

Unsure in what spirit the joke was intended, Jesse says nothing, just keeps watching the demons outside.

All of them get tenser at sunset, those few moments when the sun is low enough on the horizon to shine below the demon cloud. But the demons don't attack, even after night has truly set in. Finally Ben's yawns become frequent enough that he announces, "Fuck it, I'll be the first hunter to die in my sleep," and goes upstairs. He takes the bucket of holy water with him.

"I'm not really tired," Jesse says to Claire's questioning gaze. It's a lie, and he remembers too late that it'll give her a headache, but she allows it, leaving him a tightly-closed bottle of holy water on the table when she, too, goes upstairs.

By morning, it's clear they're under siege.

Jesse wakes up with his face sticking to the hard linoleum of the kitchen table, Ben and Claire conversing quietly by the stove. He stands up, his chair scraping the floor, alarmed yet again that his body was able to fall asleep in these conditions, while demons swirled outside and two hunters came into the very room with him—though he's unhurt, and no new traps have appeared in the night.

They turn at the sound of his chair, and Jesse tries to make the move seem casual, shaking some of his hair in front of his eyes. "There a toilet around here I can get to?" he asks.

"Yeah, upstairs," Ben says. Then he says, "Wait," and goes into the living room and stares at the ceiling for a long time, drawing lines in the air with his hands and muttering, before coming back to the kitchen and saying "Yeah, I think you're good."

This does not inspire Jesse with confidence. But he really has to go, and he's got a pretty good head for distances; if he thinks he's coming too close up there to the edges of the trap in the living room—or the one down in the basement, he reminds himself, or the one over by the front door—he'll just give it up for a bad job and piss in the bucket of holy water.

He climbs the stairs carefully, but no invisible pressure stops him even as he follows a hallway to the back corner of the house. He sees pictures on the walls, mostly of a bearded man in a cap and a cheery blonde woman, but also the occasional group photo in which everyone seems to have shotguns. More hunters. He moves on, cynically glad that at least the ones in this house are good-looking.

Going into the bathroom brings him close to the mental edge he's drawn for the trap up here, but Ben was right; he's able to finish and come back downstairs without being caught. Ben looks relieved to see him, says "There, didn't I tell you," and Jesse mumbles "Yeah, good call," which is close enough to a thank you.

Claire nudges one of the kitchen chairs toward him with her foot. "They seem to be waiting for something," she says, eyes following Jesse's as he sits down. She has a yellow legal pad in front of her, covered in tight, even handwriting. "Most likely you."

She says it the same way she listed the omens in the diner three nights ago—facts, moderately interesting, but all part of the case. Jesse remembers the grasping plume of demons coming straight towards him and shivers. "What gave it away?"

"I think it's safe to assume this has something to do with the demon who tried to capture you in Nebraska." Claire taps a pen against the table. "Do you have any idea what it wants?"

Jesse spreads his hands. What force of evil doesn't want a cambion on their side? "Whatever she's trying to do," he says, "she wanted my attention badly enough to kill my parents." He stresses the last word, eyes flicking toward Ben, who looks sharply up at him and then away.

Claire glances between the two of them, but she keeps her commentary to herself. Instead she asks him, "Do you want to go with the demons?"

Jesse's muscles tense. Of course it makes sense, from her point of view: once the demons got what they came for, this attack will end, and Ben and Claire will go back to hunting just like they did before. It's not like they have any reason to keep him. If he has to fight them—really fight them—

Ben interrupts his thoughts. "Claire, no."

"He said he wants to find the one that killed his parents," Claire says, as though Jesse isn't right there. "For him, the fastest way to do that would be to let these ones take him to it and—"

"And what the hell happens to us if he opens the door, huh? We'd both end up possessed. Or _dead_."

There's clear annoyance in Claire's face now. "Well, my tattoo is doing just fine, so unless yours isn't—"

"Yeah, until one of them slices a chunk out of it." Ben grabs one of the bottles of holy water off the table. "You think this is enough to hold off forty demons? If they—"

"We are not the point here, Ben. We're just in their way and if Jesse decided to go out there, they'd have no reason to care about us."

"Yeah, and then they'd _leave_!" Ben slams his hand down on the table. He's breathing hard. "They'd haul him off and leave us behind and then we'd be exactly where we were three years ago, with no idea where this fucking demon is or what it did to Dean and Sam. He's _not. going. alone._ "

"They're his parents."

"And Dean's mine!"

Then Ben leans back a little, ears turning red like he hadn't meant to say that, and Jesse cuts in. "I don't."

Ben and Claire both startle like they forgot he was there, and he repeats himself. "I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to go out there, okay?" He's not sure if the unspoken _don't make me_ is as obvious to them as it is to him.

Claire glares at Ben one last time, then sighs and looks down at her notepad again. He waits for her to say, _we were hoping you'd go quietly._

"In that case," she says, "we have to figure out how long our supplies are going to last us, and what we're going to do about it when they run out."


	3. Chapter 3

Taking inventory of an entire house turns out to be incredibly boring.

In deference to Jesse or just for convenience, the kitchen is becoming their base of operations; as Jesse counts cans and salt canisters, Ben and Claire stop in every twenty minutes or so with another haul. Ben brings jugs of water, either to sanctify or to drink if the pump on the well breaks down, though Jesse hopes they'll realize the latter need before the former has ruined all of it for him. Claire brings boxes of army rations and more canned goods—ones Jesse recognizes, because he'd stared at them all night in the panic room. She watches him while she deposits them in the far corner. Jesse pretends to be busy writing something until she leaves again.

Even limited to the items in the kitchen, with a sheet of Claire's yellow paper in one hand and a stubby pencil in the other, Jesse finds his mind skipping away from the task at every opportunity. He wonders what exactly Ben meant about Dean, and whether Jesse had underestimated how much the Winchesters are shaping their path. He wonders why any human being could possibly need this much canned corn. He wonders if the demon they're after is outside right now, circling like a carrion bird and waiting for him to break. He wonders who is going to make sure his parents have funerals.

Finally he finishes his list, from the twenty salt canisters to the half-empty bottle of Windex below the sink, and then stands awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen, unsure what to do with the piles of supplies but unwilling to venture past the parts of the house he knows are safe. Before he's decided, Ben comes in with a bag of salt on each arm and dumps them unceremoniously by the door.

"Lunchtime," he declares, rolling his shoulders loose. From under his sleeve Jesse sees the edge of a bandage. "You find anything good up here? Mine was all dried stuff."

"Perhaps you'd like to see our menu," Jesse says, offering Ben the list with a flourish. Ben snickers and takes it.

Jesse turns back to the counter, suddenly flushed and angry at himself. Just because Ben isn't actively trying to kill him anymore doesn't mean they're friends, doesn't mean Jesse can let his guard down. It's too easy to slip back into the rhythm he had with Oliver before, and he can't let himself be Ben's friend because of exactly what happened to Oliver after.

"Dude," Ben says, "your handwriting is like, impossible to read. It looks like a fifth-grader's."

"Shut up," Jesse snaps, surprised how much the comment stings. Fifth grade was the last time he'd sat a school year all the way through, and even early on, there'd been more to worry about in Australia than his damn penmanship. It's not going to be hard to keep hating Ben at all.

Claire reappears as Ben is digging into some chicken noodle soup, her own list considerably longer and neater than Jesse's. "I left most of the weapons down there," she says. "I didn't feel anything holy about them, and the majority probably shouldn't be touched without an instruction manual anyway." Jesse wonders about that holiness comment, but for something like him that can only be good.

"Great," says Ben, slurping up a noodle. "So we've got ten tons of salt, a couple shotguns, and no chance in hell of making it to the truck."

Claire sighs. "Well, there may well be something helpful in one of these books." She waves at the stacks littered all over the living room. "Unless the demons make a move, I'll have plenty of reading time."

Ben chews morosely. Then he turns to look at Jesse, still standing by the counter. "Can't you blow them all up or something? With your—" He wriggles his fingers. "Whatever it is?"

Jesse straightens. Should he admit how loose his control is, and hope they give him credit for using his powers so infrequently, or will this tentative alliance break once they figure out he's equally likely to kill them by accident and not be able to hurt them at all?

But Claire's sitting right there. She'll know if he tries to fake it. "I might," Jesse says finally.

"Might?"

Fuck it. "If I concentrated really hard, I might be able to eliminate a few of them," he says. "Or I might just give myself a killer headache. If they freaked me out badly enough, I'd probably destroy the lot of them along with this house and most everything in it."

There's a long pause. Ben looks at Claire, but she just raises her eyebrows. "That's...not very helpful," Ben finally says.

"I'm aware," Jesse says tightly.

"So what _can_ you do, then?" Ben asks. He rubs his palm—the one he'd grabbed Jesse with, the one Jesse had burned.

The true answer to that— _anything I want_ —frightens even Jesse.

"Not much on purpose," he says instead. "Light fires. Sense demons, when they're close. Sometimes jump to other places." He shrugs. "'S how I got here."

"You can teleport?" Ben says eagerly. "That's perfect, though, you can go get us help! There's this bar in Colorado, it's called—"

"You think I'd still be here if that worked?" Jesse says bitterly. "I _hate_ this bloody place, it's the first thing I tried when I got out of that cage. The demons are stopping me somehow."

Ben looks a little taken aback, and glances at Claire again, but she shakes her head. It's Claire that speaks next.

"Are demons all you can sense?"

Jesse frowns. That's the second time she's asked something like that, and it doesn't make any more sense this time, especially in this situation. "I can tell you have something, if that's what you mean," he says. "Whatever it is that makes you hear lies, I guess." He points at the center of her ribcage, the place where everything's a little warmer than it should be. "But I dunno what it is. I don't think I've felt any other psychics."

Claire's gaze sharpens, just as it had yesterday morning, and Jesse finds himself drawn again to this rarely-shown part of her, though he's more confused than ever. She looks like she's going to speak, until Ben mutters, "He's not gonna know where he is, Claire."

The look she shoots him is _furious_ , enough that even Jesse recoils a little. Ben raises his hands in surrender, but adds, "I'm just saying, that's not exactly top priority right now, okay?"

"What's not?" Jesse asks boldly, sensing this might be his only chance.

"You just want him to find yours first," Claire snaps, and strides stiffly into the living room, far enough to make her point but close enough that she'd hear Ben if he explained. She picks up the nearest tome and flips it open, still visibly angry.

Jesse raises his eyebrows at Ben, silently asking what just happened, but Ben just shakes his head and busies himself stacking cans. Even if Jesse were brave enough to ask Claire, he can't; she's sitting in the middle of the devil's trap. No one speaks again for a very long time.

 

* * *

 

_He's in a room made of iron. A foggy darkness blinds him. Distantly he hears Elias' voice saying "come on, try again," and knives cut into him everywhere at once. The pain drifts out of reach. Jesse is very cold. Eventually, he knows, there will be fire._

_He's walking up a staircase._

_Water splashes across his face, and the burn of blessedness feels real and present in a way the knives did not. The night is still dark but he sees now, not the shack nor the iron cage but a darkened bedroom, its two occupants newly awake with terror and rage._

_His lip curls at the sight of them, their pathetic defenses. His father brings a pistol from the drawer of the bedside table, but there is a knife in Jesse’s hand, now. They dared to call themselves parents, promised love and protection and safety, when all the while—_

_The Turners try to flee. He calls for fire, his old friend. It comes._

_The room is lit yellow now, flames cutting off any escape. His father's throat is the first to go under the blade, spilling into a metal cup he cradles there. His mother screams but her words roll off him unheeded. She falls silent with another quick slice. He pulls her head forward, tilts it over the cup to catch the blood. Let their worthless bodies be put to better use. His business is not with these pretenders._

_The bodies burn brightest, even as flames slither across the floorboards and up the walls. The fire dances behind him as he stands before the mirror and his mouth says, "Time to come home." He concentrates on his reflection, feels for that elusive thread in the back of his mind and lets the memory of his work here tonight flow away to the unknown place where the thread ends. He's waiting for someone._

_The flames grow higher._

_He goes downstairs. This moment has been forestalled for years. But there is nothing, and nothing, and he is alone in the flames._

_He watches their patterns, sees which places will crumble and which will remain when the fires go out. In those places he stands, dips his hand in the cup. Draws. Moves carefully beyond each circle before he closes it. He is prepared to keep waiting—no matter how long it takes._

_But then light, terrible and white-hot, singing at the edge of his senses and so much fiercer than the fire that surrounds him; the light that comes is not his ally. He turns himself to ash, arrows under the earth, the light coming ever closer—_

Jesse wakes up with a jolt.

For a minute he swears he still sees that light, coming somewhere just beyond him, then he blinks, disoriented. Someone has dragged a small knobbly couch into the kitchen and placed him on it. It's night, or early enough to still count, or maybe the demons outside simply swarm too thick to let in the dawn.

Demons. Right.

When he sits up, the corner of the wallet in his back pocket digs into him. Jesse bites his lip and pulls it out. It's the one thing he let himself take, the last time he was in this country, the one thing the Simmses hadn't bothered to rob him of. He stares at the single object inside: a picture of himself and his parents, every one of them smiling. His mind tries to superimpose their screaming, bloodied faces from his dream, but Jesse just stares harder at this proof of their sometime happiness. With their house gone this might be the only evidence left that they even existed. Certainly it's the only evidence in the world that they had a son.

"Jesse?"

He looks up, and finds Claire at the doorway of the kitchen, watching him.

He says "Nothing," and flips the wallet closed, though he doesn't put it away, rubbing the smooth leather compulsively with his thumbs. Behind her he sees a candle still alight, and a large heavy book open, a different one than she'd been poring over when he finally drifted off. He wonders if she slept at all. His own dream sloshes sickly around in his head: his parents, the blood, the traps, the fire—and that awful, scalding brightness. He doesn't need to wonder where the images came from: it's the same dream that brought him out of his desert and back to the house in Nebraska.

Claire enters the room, walks towards him. Jesse doesn't understand what she's doing until she stops in front of the couch and says, "Have you forgotten lies give me a headache?"

"Sorry," he blurts. He wonders if she's going to kill him after all, over one misspoken word, in the name of a headache. She had warned him. Instead she waits, and eventually, under the weight of her stare, Jesse looks up to meet her eyes.

"What were you looking at?"

Jesse's hands tighten on the wallet. She's a hunter, and this is private; it's not _for_ her. Still—he almost wants to show her, share the memory with at least one other person so it isn't lost. And it had been Claire who moved the couch in here for him, he recalls, after Ben had gone to bed and Jesse's attempts to fall asleep at the table failed. Her brusque, silent kindnesses still unnerve him, but whatever her intentions he can't bring himself to turn them away.

"My, uh. My parents." And he holds out the wallet.

Claire takes it, and looks at the picture for a very long time without saying anything. Jesse wonders where her parents are.

"You kept this the whole time?" she says eventually. Her tone is hard to read.

"It's all I had." Jesse takes back the picture, and Claire offers no further comment.

His abrupt awakening is starting to wear off, and he yawns deeply. But he doesn't want to go back to sleep, not with that nightmare still lurking in the corners of his eyes. He pinches his arms to stay awake.

Claire says, "What were you dreaming about?"

This close, Jesse can feel that uncanny warmth radiating from her skin. It reminds him of something, though he's sure he's never met another person who felt this way. Everything in this quiet hour seems full of significance. After a moment he answers her question with one of his own. "Do you ever have visions?"

She peers curiously at him. "Do you?"

Jesse looks down again. "Just—just the one." He takes a breath. "It's why I came back. I saw my parents dying."

Claire sits down next to him. The washed-out light on her dim features feels more surreal than his dream had.

"I wasn't even just watching," he confesses, something about her silence compelling him to fill it. "It was—like I could feel it happening, like it was me." His voice goes up at the end in question. He hadn't seen the face in the mirror, not well enough to know for sure. But it wasn't him, there's no way he could have—jumps are too painful for him to have gone and come back in his sleep, and it's been years since his dreams came to life, that was the first thing to go—"Do you ever have visions like that?" he asks Claire again. "Is that how they always work?"

"I don't know," Claire says after a beat. For a moment her eyes jump to the ceiling. "I don't see things, not that way."

Even if she had known what he meant, he couldn't have taken that as reassurance; nothing about Jesse works quite the way it should. The dream plays in his mind again like a video loop he can't turn off.

"There were devil's traps in the house when I got there," he says. His fingers twitch with the sense-memory of drawing blood across burning wood. "The demon knows how to catch me. I think it sent me that vision, somehow, to bring me out. My parents were just—bait."

With more hesitation than he's ever seen from her, Claire lifts her hand, then sets it lightly on Jesse's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

The gentleness is so unexpected after a lifetime without it that Jesse finds himself abruptly on the edge of tears. "I was supposed to save them," he whispers, and the rest of his words choke him.

He knows his memories of them aren't the ones his parents would have wanted him to keep, imprinted by the whims of childhood before he knew that someday he might not make more. His mother, with her unlikely love of the ocean in a landlocked state, showing him how to fold newspapers into pirate hats and barking sword lessons at the stuffed animals like a drill sergeant. His father telling him with wide-eyed conviction that the tooth fairy wore a purple tutu and a thick beard, waving his own crayon-drawn picture to prove it. A joke they all used to recite in the car, of which Jesse can remember neither setup nor punchline, only the inflection in both their voices when they chorused, "What _kind_ of chicken?" Both of them warning him of the world's dangers, from electric joy buzzers to poprocks and Coke. Their arms around him after he'd had a nightmare, assuring him that monsters weren't real, that dreams could never hurt him.

"God," Jesse coughs, wiping his face even as fresh drops gather around his eyelashes. He doesn't know how long he's been sitting here, the heat of Claire's hand melting into his shoulder, but at least he'd kept his tears silent. "I'm—I didn't mean for you to—" He hiccups and stands up, and loss of heat traces the echo of her handprint.

"You miss them," she says, like it's permission.

"It's stupid." Jesse blows his nose on a paper towel, and stands at the counter facing away from her. "Even if I'd gotten back in time, they wouldn't—wouldn't've known who I was. I made them forget. Probably better that way, anyway, who wants their eleven-year-old to come home a half-demon freak?" He's babbling, he knows, his fingernails picking at old stains on the countertop. "They never believed in demons. I bet they were so—so confused when one came to their house ask—asking for the son they didn't remember having." He laughs, an alarming sound that he cuts off at once. His mouth is shaking when he forces it closed. In the resettling quiet he swears he can hear the black cloud rushing around them outside.

"You can make people forget?"

Jesse turns around to where Claire is still sitting on the couch. Her expression doesn't show that hungry eagerness, but he can hear shades of it in her voice. "Whatever it is you've been hoping I can do," he says quietly, "I wish you'd just ask."

She looks down, and something like a smile crosses her face, fading quickly. She's not going to answer, of course. Hush settles over the room again.

But he's wrong. After a minute she says, "I watched my parents die too."

Jesse's self-righteousness deflates. "Oh."

She shrugs, brittle. "Do you believe in angels?"

His automatic response is to scoff that there's no such thing—but that war the Winchesters had wanted him to fight, the one this demon might still want him to fight, had been against more than humanity. He settles for, "If they're real, can't say they're doing such a bang-up job." He balls up the paper towel and throws it away.

Claire lets out a pained laugh, shaking her head. "They're not here to protect us." Her voice turns hard. "Even when they promise they'll look after you, they don't. He promised my mother and I would be safe. But couple years ago she went in for some minor surgery and she never woke up, and where was he then? I'm in the middle of a _swarm_ of demons and he doesn't care, I don't even know if he really—" The flow of words cuts off, and Claire wipes her palms compulsively on her jean-covered thighs.

"Who?" Jesse asks, though he's beginning to understand her odd questions. _Angels._

She stands and walks to the window, arms tightly hugging herself. "Castiel," she says. "The angel that stole my dad."

 _He's not gonna know where he is_ , Ben had told her, and Jesse feels certain this is what he meant: much as Ben wants to find the Winchesters, Claire wants to find this angel. Maybe more, if Castiel both killed her father and failed to save her mother. Maybe as badly as Jesse wants to find the demon that killed his own parents, and hates himself for not saving them.

"What happened?" he asks quietly.

She takes a deep breath, regaining some of her usual calm, though it's a thin and cracked façade. "Castiel needed a body," she says. "They're like demons that way, though they get to pretend otherwise because they need permission first. They're not concerned how they get it." Another breath, this one a little unsteady. "I don't know what Castiel told my father—he and Mom argued about it, because obviously she didn't believe an angel was actually talking to him. And I—I didn't know anything, I didn't know what was going on. I was eleven."

She looks at Jesse, quick and then away, like she's testing him for a reaction. All he can think is that this must have been what was going through her head before, when he protested his own childhood innocence. He wonders if she forgives him because she knows the feeling, or hates him even more for making her same mistakes.

"Whatever Castiel said, it worked," she continues after a minute. "My dad said yes. And he left."

She'd asked Jesse if he could exorcise more than demons.

"You don't know where he is? He never came back?" Jesse's sure angels wouldn't think much of something like him, but he can't quite believe all the stories are so wrong about them—that one might take a man from his family and never return him.

"He _did_ come back," Claire spits. "That's the worst part, that he let my dad go, let him come home, and we thought—" She bites her lip. "But demons came. Wanted to use Dad against the angels. One of them possessed my mom, and when we got to where my dad was it just. Shot him clean through."

She shrugs again, like that can make it less painful, and Jesse begins to understand why everyone hates demons so much. He'd seen the woman who birthed him possessed, yes, but he'd never seen that cold glee take over his real mother, never watched his family forced to kill each other. He flexes his hands and doesn't think about his dreams.

"And Castiel came to save us," Claire says. Her voice takes on an odd ring. "But he didn't ask for my father's body that time. He asked me."

Jesse tries to imagine a younger Claire, perhaps with a neater version of the same blonde braid, staring down an angel. "And you said no."

She seems to come back to herself for a moment, and though she turns toward him, for the first time she doesn't meet his eyes. Her mouth opens and then closes again. The longer she goes without speaking, the more doubt creeps into Jesse's mind. After he finally thinks she might not answer at all, she closes her eyes and says in a thin voice, "We would all have died."

It throws him, the admission, indirect as it is. Her carefully-maintained distance from everything and everyone comes so naturally to her that he had taken it for an inborn quality—but it seems now that she, like Jesse, had to learn the hard way how not to trust.

That she's telling all this to a cambion goes beyond his comprehension.

"What was it like?" he asks, because he's gotten this far and the haze of pre-dawn makes anything possible.

This silence lasts even longer. "Bright," she says finally, and the word seems foreign to her, hanging in the air long after she has stopped giving it breath. Jesse thinks of that terrible light that he dreamed had chased him from his body. If something behind her eyes seems to be glowing now, it's probably his imagination.

Claire's gaze is unfocused. Toneless she continues, "We smote the unholy demons that threatened the Righteous Man. We carried out the will of Heaven as our sister had reminded us, but we did not forget our promises." Her next sentence isn't in English at all, and it makes Jesse's blood crawl.

"Claire," he whispers, trying to snap her out of this trance. The words trail off. When her eyes focus on him he feels the very real fear that she's about to smite _him_.

Then she gasps, and he sees neither a wrathful vessel nor an aloof hunter but the frightened child she must have been, once. "It's not _we_ ," she says raggedly. "Castiel didn't let me _speak_. I was his vessel and then my father told Castiel to take him back instead and then he _left me_."

It's unclear whether she means her father or Castiel. Jesse doesn't dare ask.

But she stows her fear quickly, leaving only a slow-burning anger. "I don't trust you," she tells Jesse, who recoils a little. "I didn't intend to tell you that and I would prefer you behave as though I hadn't."

The threat is clear, not that Jesse had planned to speak about any of this in daylight. His own confessions, he imagines, will be held as collateral. He wonders if Ben is under similar orders and then wonders if Ben has even heard this story, if he ever managed to catch Claire in a vulnerable moment like this, or if Ben is the one Claire wants to keep her secrets from.

"But," Claire says. She moves very close to him and her heat draws Jesse in. "You asked what I wanted from you."

It's a bad idea, making deals with hunters. Jesse finds himself nodding anyway.

"If we ever find Castiel," she says, "and if my father's soul is still trapped in that body..." She bites her lip and Jesse's eyes follow the movement. "I want you to let him go."

Her face is so close. "I don't know if I can do that," Jesse says, very quietly.

Claire takes a step back. "I wasn't asking for a promise," she says. "But that's what I want."

And Jesse, torn between promising her anyway and wanting to run as fast as he can the opposite direction, says nothing.

 

* * *

 

Two more days pass, in which the demons continue to swirl without attacking and Jesse gets steadily twitchier. Claire reads through several books a day, seemingly indifferent to the language they're written in, and barely speaks to either of them. Jesse knows better than to provoke her with conversation, but with Claire's danger more or less dormant, his attention is drawn more and more often to Ben.

Ben is not taking their captivity well. Hunter like him, he's probably more used to setting traps than ending up in them, but Jesse did his fair share of stakeouts with Elias and Oliver and he's pretty sure neither of them started bouncing off walls like this when they'd been stuck in the same place for too long.

When Jesse gets out of the bathroom, for example, he hears a strange rhythmic thwapping noise, and leans into the hall as far as he dares to see Ben kicking something from one foot to the other. It looks like a sock, but the sound it makes is more like a beanbag. In trying to switch feet, Ben kicks it too far to the left, and it drops to the ground. He sighs and picks it up, then catches sight of Jesse.

"Hey," he says, stepping out into the hallway. "What, did Claire find something?"

"Just using the loo," Jesse says. Curiosity prompts him to ask, "Is that a sock?"

Ben tosses the thing. It's definitely a sock. "One of the boxes of rice was moldy," he says with a shrug. "I made a hackeysack."

Jesse blinks. "A what?"

"I dunno, man, I didn't name them." Ben tosses the sock—hackeysack—and then starts trying to bobble it with his feet again. "You try and keep it in the air as long as you can without using your hands." With an extra-hard kick, he flips it up in the air and catches it, then holds it out toward Jesse. "Here, try."

"Uh," says Jesse. Ben is standing too far away for him to reach the offered toy. "I can't."

"No, it's easy," Ben says, giving the hackeysack a shake but not moving towards him at all.

"I mean, I can't reach that, there's a trap downstairs," Jesse says awkwardly. Ben's being friendly enough, but Jesse doesn't like to remind him that Jesse is not, strictly speaking, human.

Ben's eyes widen and drop to the floor, his outstretched hand falling along with them. Jesse bites the inside of his cheek and reminds himself that this is what he expected, then turns to go back to the kitchen.

Ben catches up with him at the top of the staircase. "Hey."

"It's fine," Jesse mutters, hoping to make it so. He's angled himself automatically so Ben can't push him down the stairs—or back into the trap. Ben passes the hackeysack from one hand to the other, frowning at him.

"Look, man," he finally says. "I really, really—don't like demons."

"Had me fooled," says Jesse, not entirely under his breath. It's clearly useless to try explaining, again, that he's not actually a demon.

Ben's expression turns mulish. "But I'm trying, okay?" He gestures at the window, so full of dark smoke that it could serve for a mirror. "We're stuck here, at least for now, so we might as well be friends."

"Friends," Jesse echoes. In his memory, Oliver offers him a wide smile and a firm handshake, his other arm slung around Elias. _We're your mates now, yeah?_

Ben sighs and crosses his arms. "You can kill me with your brain," he says bluntly. "You could at least stop flinching whenever I look at you."

Jesse just stares. He doesn't know what exactly Claire told Ben, but the explanation of why exactly Jesse had set a dozen-odd hunters on fire must have entered into it. Has Ben forgotten that so quickly, or does he just not care? "Well, I'd no idea my emotions were causing you such trouble," he says eventually. "I'll stop them at once."

"That's not what I meant," Ben says, frustrated. He scratches a hand through his short hair and Jesse tenses at the sudden motion, though he pretends he didn't. "It just doesn't make any sense, okay?" says Ben. "Do I really scare you that much?"

Jesse looks him in the eye and stays very, very still. "The demons don't pretend to be my friend before they hurt me," he says, voice low but plenty clear enough to be heard. Ben looks away first.

When Jesse turns to go back downstairs, though, Ben stops him with a hand on his elbow. Then, perhaps remembering what happened the last time he grabbed Jesse without warning, he lets go. "You're not the only one who's been hurt," he says, equally serious. "If death isn't what gets you into hunting, it finds you pretty damn fast once you start." He squeezes the hackeysack, and the rice inside creaks with the pressure. "A demon killed my mom too."

Jesse almost leaves it there, another tragedy that won't help him in the end; Oliver and Elias had had a third brother, once. But the thought of them makes him catch Ben's eye one more time. "A demon killed your mother," he repeats. Then, slowly, determined to make this point clear, Jesse leans forward a little and says, "I didn't."

To his credit, Ben seems to grasp the distinction quickly. His jaw firms. "And I didn't leave you in that trap," he says. Jesse's eyes flick to the open hallway behind him.

Ben says, "I don't plan to, either," and Jesse looks back to find Ben studying his face. After a minute he shrugs, tossing the hackeysack up in the air again, and some of the tension lifts. "All I'm saying is that not killing each other on sight seems like a pretty low bar. So think about it." He withdraws down the hallway, crosses that invisible line. At the last second he turns and adds, "It really is easy once you get the hang of it," and Jesse catches the hackeysack before he's even registered that Ben threw it. With a quick grin, Ben vanishes into his room.

Jesse passes the hackeysack from one hand to the other in bemusement. Then, when he's sure Ben isn't going to come back out, he gives it an experimental kick. He catches it again.

Well. Like Ben said. They haven't killed each other yet.

* * *

Things improve a bit after that—or at least, as much as things can while palpable malice blusters outside every window. The three of them mostly spend daytime in their respective rooms: Claire in the living room reading, Ben upstairs clattering among Bobby's things, and Jesse in the kitchen, glad he spent enough time alone in the wilderness to be accustomed to boredom. As for nights, it's only a few hours after the hackeysack incident that Claire starts sleeping upstairs again, so the two of them must have worked out their tiff.

(When Jesse, lying awake on the couch in the kitchen below them, realizes he's trying to _listen_ , he pulls his pillow over both ears and hums "Waltzing Matilda" until he falls asleep.)

But Claire upstairs means no one watching Jesse at night, and despite the change in time zones and general lack of daylight, he hasn't broken the habit of being nocturnal. More than once he finds himself kicking the little sock-ball from foot to foot, counting longer and longer streaks, slipping in twists and tricks when dribbling becomes too easy. It's nothing like being in the desert, where he could jump and climb and _run_ wherever he wanted, but it's the closest he's come since crashlanding on this continent.

He's in the middle of a particularly complicated series of kicks—which at one point involves balancing on the arm of the couch—when Ben catches him at it. Jesse freezes, for once not frightened but utterly embarrassed.

"When I said it was easy, that wasn't an invitation to make me look bad," Ben says, but he's laughing.

"You were never meant to know," Jesse wails dramatically, ruined by the way his mouth curls up at the edges. "You were never meant to know how much better I am than you."

"Is that a challenge?" Ben picks the hackeysack up off the floor. "What even was that last thing you were doing?"

"Here, watch." Jesse plucks the hackeysack back from Ben's hand and feels Ben's fingers brush along his wrist. Belatedly he realizes that he's doing it again, teasing and trying to impress, but in the face of Ben's amused attention it's hard to care. "You start with it on your foot, like this, and your hands behind you—" He demonstrates, leaning back onto the couch arm with his elbows tucked in to support his weight. "Then you sort of jump, right, and twist your legs so you can—whoops."

"I'm sorry, what was that about better?" Ben cackles as Jesse bends to pick up the hackeysack again.

"God, you're encouraging him?" says Claire, coming in behind him, but even her silent approach doesn't startle Jesse out of his good mood.

"I was doing fine until you were _watching_ ," he complains.

"Jesse's confused hackeysack with gymnastics," Ben informs her.

"Nah," Jesse says absently, "it's parkour. When I was twelve or thirteen I ran with some lads who were really keen on it. Went bouncing all over Adelaide." The kids had moved on soon enough, and Jesse did too, but the knowledge that any set of roofs and walls made a playground had stuck with him long after he spent any time contained by either. He tries his move again, this time successfully, and offers Ben the hackeysack with a grin. "I should show you sometime," he says, forgetting that once the demons leave he doesn't intend to stay.

Someone knocks on the front door.

The tentative joy is sucked out of the room almost instantly, all three of them tensing as they move toward the door. Jesse can see a shadowy outline through the crusted-over windows. From the corner of his eye he sees Ben grab one of the holy water bottles.

Claire pours a ring of salt wide enough to accommodate the door when it swings open, and then holds the canister with as much deadly intent as she'd shown with a knife. Jesse hangs back, weaponless and wary of the trap under the doormat. "Ready?" Ben whispers, and Claire unlocks the door.

"Good morning!" sings a demon from the body of an elderly man with ash-blond hair, not even bothering to hide its inky-black eyes. Claire pours another quick salt line in front of the screen door, and the demon pouts. "Now, is that any way to treat a guest?"

"What do you want?" Claire asks, bland as if she were talking to the postman.

"What, I can't decide to stop in for a chat?" The leer fits badly on the demon's borrowed features. Jesse wonders if the old man is an attempt to throw them off, but he doesn't think this is the same demon that found them in Alliance. When none of them reply, the demon drops its act. "We bring a message from the Queen of Hell."

Claire moves one hand behind her back, where the demon can't see, and touches her thumb and middle finger together. Jesse's fairly sure that means something. He looks to Ben.

"Spit it out, then," Ben says, drawing closer to Claire. Jesse notices how thin the screen door is, what an easy barrier that salt line would be to break.

"Manners," chides the demon, giving Ben an equally invasive once-over. Then its mouth splits into a huge, yellow-toothed grin, and it starts to laugh.

"Have it your way, then," Ben says, and starts in with the same exorcism he'd tried on Jesse. The laughter stops, but soon after so does Ben's voice, cut off with a choking noise. Ben grabs for his throat, eyes widening.

"Hey!" Jesse says, not realizing he intended to say anything until the words are already out of his mouth.

The demon's attention swings to him, and he feels a chill tingle over his face, though it's not nearly as strong as the other demon's had been. Ben sucks in a noisy breath, stepping back across the second salt line, but Jesse doesn't look away from the demon. "Oh, you are pretty," it murmurs to itself, and then bows deeply. "Cambion."

"Why are you here?" Jesse repeats. With the smoke curling through the air behind the demon, it almost looks like its black eyes are holes straight through its head.

"For you, of course," the demon says. "The Queen sends her apologies that she couldn't be here in person this time."

This time? Jesse doesn't like the sound of that, and likes even less the sly deference in the demon's voice when it talks to him. Ben and Claire won't have missed it.

"Come inside," he says, and tries to sound commanding and not scared half out of his wits. Ben makes an indistinct noise, and Jesse turns to him and Claire, silently begging them to play along. "Break the salt line," he tells Claire, trying not to let it turn into a question. She stares him down long enough for him to get _really_ nervous—then squeezes Ben's wrist and goes back to the door, brushing away enough salt for the demon to cross.

"Much obliged," it says, opening the screen door and stepping across the doormat up to the edge of the second salt line. Claire closes the front door and locks it.

"What are you doing," Ben mutters to Jesse, and Jesse doesn't think he's imagining the betrayal he hears there. _Trust me_ , he wants to say, but he can't let the demon hear.

"Deliver your message, then," Jesse says.

The demon glances at the second salt line, but after a minute it looks back to Jesse. "And why are _you_ here, cambion?" it asks. "We had expected you to kill these two long before this."

Jesse's stomach flips unpleasantly, and he doesn't miss the way Ben's hand inches toward his gun. "Is that all you came to say?" he says to the demon. His hands shake, fire boiling along the veins, but his voice doesn't. "I was under the impression your message was _important_."

He must come close to the right mix of haughtiness and threat, because the demon pulls itself up straighter than the old man's body could probably achieve on its own. "The Queen is waiting for you," it says. "She offers her allegiance, and...protection from those who might harm you." Its eyes move to Ben and Claire, its opinion of their ability to do so quite clear.

"And in exchange?" Jesse's heartbeat is becoming painful, but the longer he keeps the demon talking the more time he buys before someone starts attacking him. If he's exceptionally lucky, he might even get some useful information.

The demon smiles, soft and wrinkly. "She asks for nothing. Only to see you again." It stretches out its hand.

"Oh, like _hell_ ," Ben cuts in, putting an arm out as though to physically stop Jesse from leaving. "She's probably trying to take out her competition so no one can rule over you slimy dick-bags but her."

"Benjamin Isaac Braeden, you watch your mouth!"

Ben's mouth snaps shut, and he actually rocks back on his heels. Jesse stares at the demon too, shocked that such a different voice came out of the same body. The demon giggles.

"I'm offended you don't recognize me, Ben," it says, no longer interested in Jesse when it can savor the effect it's having on Ben. "Didn't your mother teach you any manners?"

"Shut up," Ben whispers, gone very pale.

"She made a much nicer meatsuit than this one." The demon makes an obscene gesture over its concave chest. "But what can I say, I'm a softie. She just wanted so badly for someone to put her out of her misery—anything would be better than going back home to _you_ —"

"Shut _up_!"

Ben launches himself over the salt line and gets in three good hits before Claire drags him back, hissing something in Ben's ear. The demon just laughs again and licks its teeth. "Stabbed her right in the babymaker, just in case," it says. "That slut really got around and one mistake was enough."

"Are you planning to do something about this?" Claire snaps, and it takes Jesse a minute to realize she's talking to him.

"What do you want _me_ to do?" He's still off-balance from the sadistic glee in the demon's face, from Ben's history thrust in his face unasked-for. The demon is laughing so hard it's started wheezing.

"Can you exorcise demons or not!"

About to protest that he's never spoken a word of Latin, Jesse remembers their conversation in the panic room, which was only a week ago but feels much longer. His power itches unhelpfully in the back of his neck. "Right," he says, "just—stop laughing."

The demon falls silent, though whether by Jesse's powers or its own choice is unclear. Jesse takes a deep breath.

"Are they your  _ companions _ ?" the demon interrupts, looking from Ben to Jesse with open contempt. "Some boy who chases Dean Winchester because his mother was too much a whore to tell him who his real father is, and—" it turns to Claire— "an angel's dirty laundry?" Claire stiffens, and the demon sneers. "Oh yes, I can see that grace in you, girlie. You think Heaven scares me? Our Queen will tear their kingdom to the ground." It turns back to Jesse. "You don't belong with these  _ hunters _ , cambion. You should be with your own kind."

Jesse can feel Claire watching him, and Ben now too, gripping the gun so hard his knuckles are white. He needs to stop this. Jesse tugs at the fire that's so eager to come out of him, trying to remember what he'd done last time. "Get out," he says, and the demon's eyes roll back in its head.

But no smoke comes out of its mouth, and Jesse barely has time to think maybe it worked before the old man's body snaps forward again, eyes black.

"Does she know you're so weak?" it hisses. "Has she spent all this time searching just for this?" Jesse takes an involuntary step back, goosebumps raising on his skin. The demon holds up one knotted hand, and an unnatural breeze blows the last salt line apart. "You call yourself a cambion when you can't even contain  _ me _ ?"

It lunges toward Jesse with a snarl—and hits dead air.

"'S what the fuckin' trap's for, mate," Jesse says, and gives his powers a _shove_ that knocks the demon out cold.

Everyone falls still, waiting.

The demon doesn't get up.

"Son of a _bitch_ ," Ben swears, when several moments have passed and the demon remains motionless. He stands over the body. "God, I wish I had Sam's knife right about now."

"That old man is still worth saving," Claire chides, kneeling next to him, though she doesn't touch. Jesse scrubs his hands over his sweater, shoving his powers as far back down as they'll go. That was too easy.

Ben gives him a vicious kick. "This demon doesn't like to leave meatsuits alive," he says, and his face scrunches up like he's fighting off tears. He turns away.

Claire starts chanting in Latin, until black smoke oozes out of the man's open mouth and sinks into the floor with the smell of brimstone. She puts two fingers to the old man's neck, then leans over his face, her braid swinging forward. After a few seconds she stands up.

"Dead," she says. Ben's shoulders twitch, but he doesn't turn around. Was it the demon that killed that man, or did Jesse's fire push him past enduring? "And what was that?" Claire says, focusing on Jesse instead. "I thought you said you could exorcise things just by saying so."

"I said I _had_ done it _once_ ," Jesse corrects, already casting around for an escape route that doesn't exist. "I don't make a habit of fighting demons, okay? Fuck."

"Yeah, 'cause apparently they're all lining up to kiss your ass," Ben snaps. His face is dry but his eyes are puffy. "Way to leave that out when you told us what you were, by the way, really classy move there."

"I didn't know they were gonna act like that!" Jesse's hands are shaking very badly now. "They're just _scared_ of me, everyone is, but now I just gave them a damn good reason _not_ to be and now they're going to come _back_ but this time—" He cuts himself off, because he can't keep talking if he can't _breathe_.

Claire catches on first. "Hey!" She snaps her fingers under his face, and he jumps. "Jesse. Hey. You're hyperventilating." He manages to send her a glare that he hopes conveys _I know_ , but his breathing doesn't get any slower.

"Jesus, okay," Ben says, which doesn't make any sense, but then he stands in front of Jesse so close that his face takes up all of Jesse's vision. When he speaks again, his voice is quite different, soft and steady. "I'm going to count to four," he says, "and you're going to breathe in until I finish, and then I'm going to count again and you're going to breathe out, okay? Can you do that?"

He takes Jesse's blank stare as affirmation and starts to count. Jesse isn't anywhere close to following him at first, but after a few minutes, just the repetition of the numbers in that oddly soothing voice starts to calm him down. He manages to take two deep breaths with Ben's count, and then the pressure on his lungs seems to let go. He slumps back against the wall.

"Better?" Ben says.

 _Aren't you mad at me_ , Jesse almost asks, but he's too grateful for being able to breathe again; he's never had one pass that quickly before. He nods.

"Good," Ben says, turning brusque again. "Because if you're right, we need to get out of here."

 

* * *

 

From the way Claire and Ben jump into action, he'd think they'd done this before—but no doubt, while Jesse had been amusing himself with useless games, they'd been planning for this very thing. "You still want to try for the salt round?" Claire asks. "It's a long way to Colorado."

"Emily's our best bet for hex bags," Ben replies. "And Haley can muster us some help if it comes to that."

"What?" says Jesse, who's still trying to picture the puzzle map of the United States he had as a kid and figure out which one Colorado was. One of the squarish ones, he's pretty sure, but that tells him nothing about how far away it is or what they'll find when they get there. If they get there.

"Emily is a witch," Claire says, loading her shotgun. "She can make something that hides us from demons." And Jesse still doesn't know where Colorado is, or what _salt round_ is code for, but that sounds pretty good to him.

"I saw a water tank in the basement," Ben tells them as they huddle around the kitchen table, "and I'm like ninety percent sure it feeds the sprinkler system in the yard." He sketches a rough approximation of the salvage lot, a square for the house and a lumpier square for the truck, with little dots scattered between for the sprinklers. "Bless the tank, turn on the sprinklers, run like hell. Claire, I think you should be in the back this time; I know how to get the truck to go faster and you're probably a better shot anyway." He looks at Jesse. "You with me so far?"

"We run...through the holy water?" Jesse says, like he's only confused.

"Oh," Ben says, frowning down at his paper. "Right. _Dammit. _" He stares at the paper for a long while, chewing his bottom lip.__

"How much does it hurt you?" says Claire.

Jesse can't help the way he cringes at that. "Um." To his surprise, Ben is giving Claire an equally affronted look.

"It's important," she snaps. "This is the best plan we've got so far, and before we scrap it we should know if we're avoiding something that feels like a hangnail or something that feels like getting a limb amputated. Does it only hurt when the water is touching you, or will you be in pain for hours afterward? Can you fight through it, or is this going to incapacitate you?"

Jesse swallows. "It's—it's more like having boiling water poured on me, I guess," he says. "And it—hurts worst while it's still on me. I don't know exactly how long it takes to stop." He's betting the Simmses do, though; they'd made sure to splash another round on him whenever the last was in danger of fading.

She looks down at Ben's map. "So if you did go through this much—"

"Some people actually react to pain, Claire, not everyone is you," Ben interrupts. "We'll figure out something else."

"With what? Salt? We don't have near the kind of firepower to hold off this many."

"Can't you do your Enochian thing?"

"You _know_ that only works on one at a time, and I haven't tried it on ones that aren't in hosts—"

"It's fine," Jesse cuts in. He rubs the sleeves of his sweatshirt, the familiar places it's worn thin. They both stare at him and he attempts a smile. "Not like I haven't been through worse, right?" Claire can no doubt hear the honesty when he adds, "It'll be worth it if it means getting out of this place."

Ben looks at Jesse for a beat longer than he's comfortable with, but eventually accepts this. "In that case..."

It's not a very complicated plan, in the end. Ben retreats to the basement to bless the water, and Claire stays in the kitchen with Jesse, teaching him how to pack salt into shotgun shells—the salt rounds she must have been referring to earlier. She also tries to talk him through the proper use of a shotgun, no doubt after his poor marksmanship the first time, but he can't pay attention when all he hears is Elias giving him the same instructions a lifetime ago.

Ben returns from the basement, grim-faced. "It's done. You ready?"

"As we're getting," Claire replies. Her backpack is filled to bursting with salt rounds, several outfits jettisoned so she could pack more ammo, and she holds her rifle with brisk competence. Jesse grips his borrowed gun, not very ready at all, and nods.

"Right." Ben slings his own duffel over one shoulder. "The switch is on this side of the house. Claire, cover me while I turn it on, and Jesse, don't come outside until the sprinklers start, understand?"

Jesse, who'd been half-hoping to run all the way to the truck before the water hit, asks, "Why not?"

"Because if you can't do anything to stop them, they might grab you and drag you off to Hell while we're waiting."

With that, Ben opens the kitchen door, fires a few random shots into the cloud blocking his path, and disappears around the side of the house, Claire with her rifle right behind him.

The wind blowing in through the door feels much too icy for April, even though the smoke has lifted immediately in front of him, aiming somewhere to the left where Ben and Claire must be. Jesse wants to close the door but he can't, he needs to watch for the holy water so he can throw himself into it because somehow he's less afraid of both pain and the demonic clouds than he is of being left behind.

He hears a whoop, then the dry yard hisses to life with rotating bands of water flung as high as Jesse's waist. "Go!" he hears Ben yell, and Jesse pulls his hood up tight around his face and runs.

The truck looks close, Ben and Claire already on their way to it, and for the first few seconds his clothes protect him. Then a fresh line of water whips across his shoulderblades, seeping down to his skin, and the ceiling of smoke hovers so low that Jesse has to run at a crouch. Soon his face steams all over, eyes stinging too badly to see.

It burns.

Faintly he hears the rumble of an engine, but for all he knows it could be the thunder-growl of the demons pressing him down into this endless spray. His hands spasm under the rivulets dripping from his sleeves and he almost drops his gun. He curls away from a blast that strikes right across his cheek—then slips on the wet ground, and falls to his hands and knees. A ringing silence follows.

Jesse gets slowly to his feet. He scrapes the holy mud off his hands onto his equally muddy jeans, and wipes his eyes on one of the few dry places left on the underside of his sweater. The water has stopped. The demons are drawing back. Jesse sees Ben, already at the wheel of his truck, and Claire poised on the open truck bed. Then he sees two fang-bared mouths emerge from the shadows as hellhounds slide out to block his path. The larger one raises its snout in a howl.

Claire fires. She misses entirely, of course, because humans can't see hellhounds, but the noise is suggestion enough to Jesse's nerves that he raises his own forgotten shotgun. He clips the first hellhound on the shoulder, but that just makes it leap toward him, snarling. Its partner lopes toward Jesse from the other side, herding him back away from the truck. Jesse shoots the first one again, and it yelps at the rock salt that sinks into its chest, but then his two rounds are spent and both of the hellhounds still stand between him and the dubious safety of the truck.

He drops the gun, reaching beneath his sweater instinctively, and like a miracle his hand finds the knife so familiar on his belt that he'd forgotten it until this very moment.

"All right, you bastards," he mutters. "Come get me."

 

* * *

 

The problem isn't that Jesse hates killing.

When the first hellhound lunges, he crouches low and meets it with a blade deep in its gut. He's not paying attention to the distance between himself and the truck; he's paying attention to the black blood pouring like oil over his hands, the way the flesh of the hellhound gives against his blade. His sweater is still soaked with holy water, and much as it stings to press his own arms into the wet cloth, the hellhound sizzles more when Jesse gets an arm around its neck and drives his knife into the soft place behind its skull. There's a rush of power that has nothing to do with his heritage when he sees the white flash of its spinal cord.

Jesse doesn't know if the stink of sulfur is from the second hellhound's breath searing his neck or if it's just the smell of his own adrenaline. But this creature is ready to make him into a chew toy, so if Jesse's swing of the knife across its throat has fire behind it, who could blame him? He barely has time to savor the victory before more hellhounds start circling.

Some part of his mind wants him to stay, to slaughter every last one of them and scatter their bodies across the ground, and that more than anything is what sends Jesse running as fast as his human legs can carry him. The hellhounds break into a gallop, and one of them nearly gets its teeth around Jesse's leg before Claire hauls him up into the truck with her, wincing when the slick blood on Jesse's hand gets on her own. "Drive!" Claire shouts, smacking the roof of the truck, and the speed of Ben's acceleration knocks them both flat.

"How did you do that?" Claire demands, pushing herself onto her hands and knees. "How were you fighting them?"

"I can see them," Jesse rasps—some of the holy water had, despite his best efforts, made it into his mouth. He strips off his sodden sweater and throws it aside, palms blistering, before struggling to sit up.

What he sees, following them along the cracked two-lane highway, cannot rightly be called a pack, because there are too many of them.

"More?" Claire guesses, scanning the road like the hellhounds will appear to her if she just stares hard enough. Her eyes go higher, where she can see the cloud of demons rolling towards them against the wind.

"Lots," Jesse breathes. "Lots, lots more, and I left my gun back there, _shit_ —"

Claire leans over him, cutting off his view. "Jesse. Breathe."

He flushes. "I'm not having a panic attack," he mutters. "I'm just mildly concerned that we're all about to _die_."

Claire reloads her rifle. "Point me," she says.

"What?"

"You can't shoot, and I can't see, so you have to be my eyes. Come on." She moves to the end of the truck and braces herself, kneeling, gun at the ready. When he doesn't follow, she turns and gives him a _look_.

"Um. Okay." Jesse scoots beside her, then gets up on his knees too so he can sort of see what she sees. The bounding wave of hellhounds is drawing closer, despite Ben's attempts to put on more speed, truck grinding away beneath them. The wind blows cold across his bare arm when he points. "They're about twenty meters back right now, maybe up to my shoulder tall, but they're moving around a lot."

Claire shoots with no further warning, making Jesse jump. The frontmost hellhound barks but keeps coming.

"Got his shoulder," Jesse explains. "He's gone off to the left, though, right above that long crack in the road there—"

Claire doesn't waste time asking for clarification, just lets off another shot. This one hits the hellhound square in the eye, and it tumbles to the ground, disappearing under the pounding feet of its fellows.

"Got him," Jesse says, impressed, and Claire just reloads and says, "Next?"

But it's not like last time; the hellhounds had slowed down then, stopped after awhile. These hellhounds are bigger, faster, and take twice the ammo to kill. Jesse and Claire pick them off one by one, but for every one that goes down, two more appear, and they inch closer and closer to the back of the truck.

"We can't keep this up," Jesse says the next time Claire pauses to reload. The truck is rattling him down to his bones and he's lost track of how long they've been out here; anything that isn't the sound of Claire's gun or the sight of misshapen hellhound faces seems impossibly distant. His arms are numb with wind, and he feels like he ought to be colder. "They're getting closer, there are too many."

"I'm open to suggestions." Claire fires twice into the broad chest of the last hound Jesse pointed out, but it shakes the salt off and keeps coming.

And Jesse's blood is scorching him with the force of its suggestion, but that way lies fire and blood and death. He won't listen to it.

A fresh roll of thunder echoes over the road behind them—but not the growls of hellhounds this time; the demon cloud is spreading out, disrupting, individual columns of smoke peeling off and darting through the shadowed sky. Then the entire truck rocks, and Jesse spins to see a streak of smoke in the truck bed with them, its outline rapidly solidifying into the shape of a little girl with blank eyes and vicious claws.

"Claire!" he yells, as another demon comets down and takes on the same barely-human shape. Claire rolls and braces herself anew, taking aim, but she's too late to stop the first demon girl from leaping on Jesse and plunging her claws past his thin t-shirt and all the way through his ribcage.

If he were human, that would be the end of him; blood bubbles up to his mouth from his shredded lungs, and he can actually feel one claw twitch with the beat of the heart it's stuck in. His vision grays out, the demon grinning above him and twisting its claws.

An arc of water falls over him. The demon screeches and lets him go, flickering back into smoke and away. Then the holy water spills into the gaping holes it left through his chest, and Jesse screams.

It's starting.

His wounds seal shut, inside and out. The second demon evaporates as though it never was. The air is getting hotter, and whatever part of him could hold this back has been fully submerged now. Jesse pays no heed to the jerking motion of the truck or the whipping wind that should long since have chilled him to the bone; he simply stands up.

Claire drops the bottle of holy water. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, she was killing you, Jesse—"

Killing him? Nothing kills him. Things just hurt him, and then he makes them stop.

But before he can take so much as a step, the hellhounds finally catch up to the truck, and the fastest one leaps. It bowls Jesse over, claws raking over him anew, and his vision is overwhelmed with perfect dark clarity.

" _Stop!_ "

The truck brakes shriek, the hellhounds snarl, and then everything falls utterly still.

Jesse throws the dog that attacked him back onto the road where its pack stands frozen. It snaps at him, coiling as though to jump again.

" _Down_ ," Jesse breathes, and as one the hellhounds slink lower, bellies to the ground. A high whine comes from the one under his gaze.

He had a dog, once, or at least took partial ownership of the fluffy stray that lived in the commune he'd stayed with when he was a kid. Its name was Keener, and it didn't like him very much, but one of the adults taught Jesse how to train the dog to do tricks, giving treats when it was good and scolding it when it misbehaved. He looks over the mass of heaving bodies cowering before him. One trick in particular was Jesse's favorite.

_"Play dead."_

There's a deafening crack of thunder behind his words, a rush of control that makes his blood sing, and the agonizing howl from the dogs doesn't end until every last one of them drops dead at his feet. Everything looks sharper, darker, truer, and for a second Jesse feels nothing but pure elation.

The problem isn't that he hates killing. It's that he loves it.

Jesse crumples to the ground.


	4. Chapter 4

_Warmth and softness surround him, sleep an easy comfort. He's home, and safe._

_"Hey there, munchkin," his mother whispers, smoothing back his hair. Jesse nudges into her lap, arms going around her waist, and soaks up the gentle touches._

_Sometime later her hands pause, and she reaches for something beyond him. "Here, sit up," she says, and pulls his sleepy body upright. Her other hand holds a glass of cold water. "Drink this," she says._

_"Don't wanna," Jesse mumbles. Something bad will happen if he does, though he isn't quite sure what. He wants to go back to sleep._

_"But you're sick, honey," his mother tells him, resting a hand on his forehead. Jesse doesn't feel sick, but her hand is much colder than his hot skin, so it must be true. "Just drink a little. It'll make you feel better."_

_"It hurts." Jesse flails his arms, scooting away from the glass. "Mom, stop, it hurts."_

_She shushes him, still so gentle. "You need to drink it, baby. You're sick, and it'll make you better."_

_"No," Jesse protests, but she lifts him up and draws him close to her again._

_"It'll make you better," she promises, and then the water is burning his throat from the inside out._

Jesse wakes with a gasp and tumbles out of a bed he doesn't recognize. It's past dark, though his body tells him not very. He can barely see anything with the only light coming in under the door, but the room is small, with none of the musty smell he'd been getting used to; humans use this room, and frequently. He's weaponless and nearly naked, stripped down to his boxers, and he has no idea where this place is.

Light, first. Jesse finds the outline of a lamp and scrabbles up and down its base until his fingers discover the switch. Sudden brightness makes him blink. Cardboard boxes pile against the far wall, with stacks of books teetering on top of them—a storage room, maybe? But someone paid enough attention to this bed to make sure the pillowcases matched the quilt, to put that cheerful picture of a forest in springtime where someone in the bed wouldn't miss it. Jesse spins, searching for devil's traps, and sees none. Then he pauses.

Someone else has placed his own knife and belt on a pile of neatly-folded clothes in the chair next to the bed. Someone, while he slept, has cleaned the blood off his hands.

He picks up the knife, unsheathes it. The blade has been cleaned, too, as though the previous day had never happened.

Or was it the previous day? Jesse's powers knocked him so deeply unconscious that only the last few seconds of dreaming make it feel like time passed at all. Who knows how long he's been in this room?

Long enough, in any case. He sets the knife down and dresses in the clothes that were left for him, all smelling freshly laundered. He recognizes his jeans, but the t-shirt is unfamiliar, dusty blue and a little loose around the shoulders. He supposes his own shirt had been torn up when that demon attacked him—and as he's been wearing the same one this whole time, it's probably for the best. He's pleased to see his red sweater survived this latest wash, and slips it on over the new t-shirt.

His back pocket is empty.

Jesse pats himself down, checking all the other pockets, though he would have felt the shape if they'd been full. His sweater pocket proves empty too. About to truly worry, already wondering what possible use anyone else could have with it, Jesse spots it on the floor where it had fallen off the pile: his father's wallet.

He flips it open, very briefly, just to make sure no one removed the picture it contains. His mother's frozen smile doesn't bring the comfort it usually does.

Knife on his belt, fresh socks under his boots, and the wallet back where it belongs, Jesse is beginning to feel much more like himself. But that's still a far cry from safe. He gives the doorknob a tentative twist: unlocked. Quite a bit of noise filters up from the rest of the building—chatter mostly, sounding harmless enough, though the sheer number of voices is enough to make Jesse nervous. He checks both floor and ceiling thoroughly before stepping out into the hallway.

At the end of the hallway, a balcony overlooks a warmly-lit room bustling with people: a pub, it looks like. A few tables line the balcony walls up here, too, but they're empty. Jesse peers down, briefly catches sight of a blonde head that might be Claire. It troubles him that already the thought of her being here brings more relief than trepidation—especially when he has no idea what she thinks about that stunt he pulled with the hellhounds.

He considers going back to the room with the bed and hiding out until someone comes looking for him. But he's done nothing but hide in the unsafe houses of strangers since he set out after this demon, and if he can brave the people downstairs, maybe he can make it outside and finally breathe fresh air untainted by sulfur.

No one notices him creeping down, but Ben spots him hesitating at the foot of the stairs and scoots away from his table. Jesse shifts so his knife is a little easier to reach and waits for him.

But all Ben does is clap a hand to Jesse's shoulder and smile, saying, "Took you long enough, man, thought you were gonna sleep through dinner too." His cheeks glow a little pinker than usual, Jesse notices, and his hand slips over against the bare skin of Jesse's neck before he lets go. The beer bottle in his hand probably explains that.

"Where are we?" Jesse asks.

Ben's smile gets broader. "We made it, dude. Whatever that was you did, it worked." He taps the rim of his bottle against the center of Jesse's chest with a low _thunk_. Jesse doesn't bruise, as a rule, but the sensation lasts longer than the force behind it warrants. Ben seems grateful, but then he'd been busy driving the truck and probably hadn't seen exactly what Jesse did. "C'mon. Sit."

Jesse rubs the spot on his chest. "Made it where?"

Ben spreads his arms, grinning. "Welcome to the Salt Round. Best hunter's bar west of the Mississippi."

"Best _what_?" Jesse tries to say, but his voice gives out when he looks to the front door and sees, covering the entire ceiling between the front desk and the door, a dark blue devil's trap.

"Hey, no, calm down, these guys are my friends," Ben says, but now Jesse is noticing how nearly everyone in the bar has a gun, how some of the abstract symbols framed on the walls are ones he recognizes from Elias teaching him how to ward off evil. There's another trap over the only other door he can see, and given half a chance, everyone here would try to kill him.

"Why did you bring me here?" he whisper-shouts, regretting every kind thought he's ever had for Ben. Before the frown on Ben's face can turn into a reply, someone else comes up behind him to sit at their table, and Jesse shuts down.

"Hey, Ben," says the newcomer—white woman in her late twenties, blonde ponytail, young face, not visibly armed nor especially muscular but that just makes it more likely she's got something nasty up her sleeves, perhaps literally. She gives Ben a quick hug. "Katie said you were looking for me?"

"Yeah," Ben says, still frowning at Jesse, but his expression clears when he turns to the woman. "Yeah, actually, can you help us with something?"

"I'll give it my best shot," she says, eyes on Jesse. "Who's this?"

"This's Jesse. He's riding with me and Claire for a little while. Jesse, Emily."

Jesse manages a nod, but doesn't offer his hand to shake. Emily gives him a long, inquisitive once-over, and Jesse barely represses a shudder. "Hiya, Jesse."

"Emily's the one I was telling you about before," Ben says when Jesse doesn't respond. "She's good with magic, she can make us hex bags to get these demons off our ass. Right?"

Good with magic? What does that mean? The Simmses hadn't used magic on him; witches were barely above monsters in their eyes. What if magic works on him, the way ordinary weapons don't?

"You're having demon troubles?" Emily says.

"And hellhounds, if you can believe it," says Ben. "I was just telling Katie this. The demon that was hanging around when the Winchesters disappeared? Apparently it's the freaking Queen of Hell."

And if the hex bags are supposed to protect against demons, who's to say they won't work against Jesse? It would be just his luck to buy the magical equivalent of a devil's trap, or accidentally get himself banished to Hell. Might as well give the Queen his head on a plate right now. Jesse feels dizzy.

"And you caught her attention? That's not easy."

Emily looks at Jesse again. He should say something, distract her from that train of thought, but if she's a witch she might have something like Claire and know he's lying. Claire is nowhere to be found, Jesse notices. He probably scared the shit out of her yesterday—he'd sure scared himself—and in return she brought him somewhere she won't have to take him on alone. A Latina woman by the windows is sharpening a machete.

"We're after the Winchesters," Ben says. "Whatever she did to them, she doesn't want us undoing it. Can you help us?"

If Jesse's not actively _in_ a trap, his powers won't be confined to a small space. He just has to avoid both the exits until these hunters are dealt with.

Emily hums. "I'll need to get a few things. It's not every day someone needs hellhound protection. Which way are you guys headed? Will you be staying here long?"

He'll just jump. Even disappearing in plain view of—how many—thirty-eight hunters can't be worse than what's going to happen if he stays. Certainly it's subtler than blowing out a wall.

"Not sure," Ben says, with a long look at Jesse. Jesse has no idea what expression he's making, but the frown is back. Eventually Ben looks back at Emily. "It's hard to pay attention to the queen bee when you've got the whole hive buzzing around you."

"I believe that's the point of a hive," Emily says. Her red-polished fingernails drum against the table. "Did you hear about the omens in Pennsylvania?"

Jesse reaches for his powers, but they're flickering like a candle in a strong wind, too agitated and weak for him to catch hold. He can't jump like this. The rap-tap-tap of Emily's fingernails sounds too loud. Did he use all his fire up on the hellhounds? What's happening to him?

"In Pennsylvania? What omens?"

"They had a huge lightning storm a little while ago. In _Centralia_. I guess you've heard the stories about that place."

He hadn't felt this way after burning that shack down; that rush had filled him so full that he'd still been brimming with it when the fire whirl finally died. He's wished plenty of times that he could make his powers go away, but not now, not when he needs them so badly—

"Jesse hasn't, I bet." Ben kicks him under the table. "Jesse? You know anything important about Centralia?" He makes sure to catch Jesse's eye when he asks—he's not asking about the story Emily knows; he's asking if Jesse will turn out to have a history there the way he did in Alliance. Wondering, no doubt, if Jesse can be trusted after all.

"Never heard of it," Jesse manages, and he's telling the truth, but still his muscles wind a little tighter. He hopes he's not going to throw up.

"Storytime," Emily sing-songs, looking straight into Jesse's eyes. Even though Jesse can barely concentrate on anything that isn't his uneven breathing, he finds himself staring back. She stills her tapping fingers.

"The town of Centralia was built on a ribbon of coal," she says. "For years the people mined, digging for more and more coal and leaving empty shafts behind them. Then, sometime in the sixties, something sparked all that coal on fire." The hint of a rasp in her voice keeps Jesse's attention fixed on her. Emily leans a little closer to him. "It burned," she says, "and the mines made the fire spread. The air turned toxic; the ground opened up and swallowed people. But some of them stayed." Emily shakes her head, eyes never leaving Jesse's. "Can you imagine that? To live surrounded by fire, knowing it might break loose at any second?" Her voice goes even quieter. "The fire always wins. It's still burning even now."

Jesse shivers.

"The authorities said it got started with a landfill burning, but that's bullshit," Ben cuts in, swaying over the table. "Samuel freaking Colt went there _himself_ , two hundred years earlier. There was barely even a town there but he already knew there was something wrong with the place."

Emily finally moves her gaze back to Ben, and Jesse shakes himself. What difference does some town in Pennsylvania make, anyway? Why would the demon go there?

"But you know what they say he found there, don't you?" says Emily to Ben. "Why he tried to make sure no one settled that town in the first place?"

"Purgatory, right?" Ben says. "I’ve got one of Colt’s journals, you know, he says there’s a gate there—but I thought Dean said Purgatory is just, like, afterlife for monsters. What's that got to do with demons? Or with Dean?"

Emily’s expression turns thoughtful. "Well, didn't the Winchesters have an angel batting for their team?"

The look Ben shoots Jesse is inexplicably guilty, and he checks over his shoulder before answering. "Maybe they used to, but I sure haven't seen any divine intervention since they disappeared."

"Even so." Emily looks down, tracing squiggles over the surface of the table. "They've had allies in Heaven, and they've both escaped Hell. Maybe Purgatory was the last place left."

Ben's face lights up, and Jesse looks away.

He can't care about this. Purgatory means nothing to him, and neither do the Winchesters. He's surrounded by hunters right now, with no time to worry about ones who've been missing for years, and Sam and Dean may have let Jesse go before but if they're as good as Ben says they wouldn't make that mistake twice. He won't stay here and let history repeat itself. It's just that leaving would be easier if Ben stopped looking so damn happy.

"Emily," Ben declares, "you are an actual genius. Hang on, I've gotta find Claire." He slides out of his seat and then points at Jesse. "Don't go anywhere, okay? It's all gonna be fine." And he leaves.

This is Jesse's chance. If he can get back upstairs without anyone noticing, give himself a minute for his head to clear and his powers to stop sputtering, he can be gone with no one the wiser. Jesse stands up and then has to grab the table when a wave of vertigo catches him off-guard.

"Hey, you feeling okay?" Emily reaches out to balance him, her hand covering the same spot on his chest that Ben had tapped with his beer. Jesse recoils.

"I'm fine," he says, even as another chill passes through him. He's gotten too used to his powers burning just under the surface, and this is the price he's paying. If she's going to kill him, he hopes she gets a move on.

"Rough trip, I heard," she says sympathetically. Then she edges a little closer and the corner of her mouth tips up. "Maybe I could help you out with that."

Jesse blinks, his escape plans temporarily diverted. She must be talking about the hex bags, because he could almost take that as a proposition.

"What are you doing with Ben and Claire, anyway?" she asks, leaning in to lower her voice. Something about the question seems oddly serious. "Are they your friends?"

 _That remains to be seen_ , Jesse thinks. "They gave me a ride."

Emily frowns. "Is that all?"

Jesse gives a tiny shrug. Claire told him about her father, but she hadn't meant to. Ben let him out of one trap but here he is again.

"Well." Emily puts one hand around the back of Jesse's neck and, heedless of the way he tenses, pulls him down to whisper in his ear. "You ever want someone else to give you a ride, let me know." Then she _grabs his ass_.

Jesse breaks her surprisingly strong grip and backs up, casting a panicked look around. A waitress noticed that, some pale brunette staring at him wide-eyed, and he doubts she was the only one. "Look," he fumbles, "I'm not—I don't, want, uh—"

Emily laughs softly. "Are you really going to pull the blushing virgin card?"

He does blush at that, and hopes she doesn't see it. He is _not_ going to sleep with a hunter—or a witch, whatever—and given that his most recent kiss ended in literal fireworks he wouldn't risk it no matter who she was; he's learned his lesson. He resolutely ignores her breasts and says, "Sorry."

"Shame," she murmurs. "You have such beautiful eyes."

Before Jesse can even begin to respond to that, she looks at something over his shoulder and turns businesslike. "Word of advice, then," she says. He's grateful that she at least keeps her voice low. "Ben brought you here because you were running from demons, but don't go feeling too safe without my hex bags. The back door in the kitchen doesn't even have a trap over it." And with one last squeeze of his arm, she walks past him and Jesse is alone.

It takes him exactly six seconds to head for the kitchen.

He swerves and ducks into the bathroom first, because while Ben and Claire haven't reappeared, that waitress is looking at him again and he isn't keen to attract any more of her interest. He counts to thirty, excruciatingly slow, and when he peeks out the door again he doesn't see her. He forces his walk into a casual stroll and crosses the hall to the kitchen's double doors.

Empty? No, not quite—the cook, who could be anywhere between thirty and fifty, moves comfortably from stove to sink to chopping block with no apparent intention of leaving. Jesse bites back a curse.

But there's nothing for it. The longer he lingers, the more likely Ben or Claire will find him.

Emily was right, there's no sign of a trap in here, and Jesse manages to get almost halfway across the kitchen before the chef notices him. "Hey, what are you—"

"Mind if I pop outside for a smoke?" Jesse interrupts, with his most winning smile. He wishes he _did_ have some cigarettes, now it occurs to him—the psychological comfort makes up for the total noneffect of the nicotine—but he left his pack continents away. He doesn't stop walking.

The cook looks baffled. "Uh, sure, but—"

"Thanks, mate," Jesse says, and then he's through the smaller metal door and finally, finally outside.

Then he has to lean against the wall for a minute while the adrenaline rush shakes itself out.

But it looks like his fortune may have turned at last, because when he settles enough to look around he sees that he's in a desert. Not as sparse as the one he's used to—there are actual trees here, plural, rough and twisted pines extending up the mountains on both sides—and the grass isn't quite the same, but the dirt is red and the air is dry and Jesse could cry for how clear the night sky above him is.

He crosses the parking lot and keeps going out past the edge of the streetlights. The night air is cool but still somehow seems warmer than the air in that bar. There's a road winding through the pass in both directions, and a city lighting up the valley below, but The Salt Round sits a good kilometer from the nearest houses, oddly isolated for the number of people he saw inside. In front of Jesse there's only the slow climb of the mountain, no sign of the lights that mean people.

It'll be a while, before the hunters forget about him. Jesse spares a moment to wish he had more supplies than just his knife; he'll need to find water, soonest, and learn anew which plants and animals are best to eat. But he can do it. This is familiar, this is life as he's known it for three whole years. He can only hope Ben and Claire will prove wiser than the Simms brothers—that if he leaves them alone, they'll let him go.

Red dirt crunches under Jesse's boots, and he doesn't look back.

 

* * *

 

Some hours later Jesse can't see any lights but the moon and a faint orange glow from down the mountain. He's managed to catch a rodent of some kind as it emerged from its hole, and given that his last meal was at that hunter's house at least a day and a half ago, Jesse is perhaps less cautious than he might otherwise be as he collects firewood and scuffs out a pit to build it in. His powers are still oddly subdued, but calling fire is a skill he actually practices and by this time it's more reflex than effort to hold one hand out toward the kindling and let his fingertips ignite.

Something snaps in the shadows beyond the clearing, and Jesse turns around in time to catch a blue electronic glow clicking off.

He jumps to his feet, but before he can even decide which way to run, a high-pitched voice yells "Stay where you are!" and someone emerges from behind a tree, gun-first.

It's the waitress, the one who was watching him earlier; she must have seen him leave after all. Her large eyes look even larger by firelight but her gun stays steady, pointed at Jesse's heart.

"Where is she?" she demands. "Where's Emily?"

"What?" Jesse says, and it's not even confusion really, just despair that this time it's going to start over something he didn't even do.

The waitress isn't having any of it. "Emily, my girlfriend Emily, where is she? And don't you dare act like you don't know who she is, I saw the two of you before."

"Girlfriend?" Jesse echoes. The bruise on his ass begs to differ.

She takes a step closer. "For over two years now, yeah. Hence my _confusion_ when a stranger shows up at my bar and suddenly Emily gets handsy."

This is all so ridiculous that Jesse would laugh if it weren't for the gun. "Hey, I didn't like it any more than you did," he says, but she's talking again before he can even get the sentence out.

"I figured you were some kind of incubus, but that fire thing you just did? What the hell was that?" She gestures with her gun at the blaze now crackling merrily on the logs he'd managed to find. He wishes she had waited to accost him until he'd eaten his dinner.

"What fire thing?" says Jesse. It's just a game of delaying the inevitable at this point.

"Don't give me that bullshit," she says. "I have been tracking your ass through the mountains, in the dark, all fucking night. I already called for backup and my girlfriend is still missing so I am telling you right now, _do not fuck with me_."

Of course she's already called for backup; this is Jesse's life. Idly he considers telling her that Claire's quiet not-threats are a lot scarier. Still, he makes one last-ditch effort. "I don't know where Emily is. I didn't do anything to her."

If she _were_ Claire, at least she'd know that was the truth. As it is she just snorts. "So she disappears, and you just happen to run off at the exact same time."

His false smile is bright as they come. "Looks like."

"And heading in the exact opposite direction of civilization, that's because you're so innocent?" She holds the gun a little higher and advances again. "I know what I saw; you're not human. So what the fuck are you?"

At that, he really does start laughing. How many people are going to ask him that question, when they've already made up their minds what to do about him? How many times is he going to have to live through this? The girl looks alarmed at his laughter, growing steadily louder, but Jesse does not care anymore.

Then headlights cut through the clearing, and he forces himself to stop before the laughter turns into sobs.

Two people jump out of the newly-arrived vehicle, also holding guns, silhouetted by the headlights. Jesse stares behind them, waiting for more, until he realizes he knows that truck.

"Katie? You okay?" Ben calls.

"Yeah, for now," the girl in front of Jesse yells back, keeping her eyes and her gun on him.

Ben jogs up the slope to Jesse's fire pit, Claire hanging back somewhere out of the light. Katie shifts over to accommodate Ben. "What's happening?" he says, then follows the line of her gun. "Jesse?"

With the hand not resting on his knife handle, Jesse gives a tiny wave.

Ben lets his own gun drop to his side, and Claire emerges from the shadows in a completely different direction. Jesse's not exactly surrounded, but the odds are getting worse. "You know him?" says Katie, whose weapon is still very much ready to fire.

"Why are you pointing a gun at him?" Claire replies. Not the most reassuring declaration of friendship.

"Emily's gone." Katie's arm wavers for the first time, and she turns to look at Ben. "She didn't come find me at the end of my shift, and she's not returning my calls, and last I saw her she was hanging all over this guy." She refocuses her aim. "So I followed him out here, and he has yet to give me a good explanation of where she is."

"Whoa, okay, let's not make any hasty bullet decisions here," Ben says, tugging on Katie's elbow. "I thought Emily was going out of town for supplies. We asked her for some hex bags, she said she'd need to get some stuff first."

Katie blinks, and lets her arm be lowered. "Why didn't she tell me that?"

"I dunno, probably assumed I'd tell you," says Ben. "Which I would have, if you hadn't vanished as soon as you were done working."

A pause as Katie digests this. Confusion is slowly replacing determination on her face, but she's still plenty suspicious when she looks back at Jesse. "That still doesn't explain what he's doing out here."

All three of them wait for Jesse to say something, and Jesse finds that his earlier glib sarcasm has abandoned him. How can he explain that this had been the safest place he's found on this continent yet, and that if his powers had restored themselves a little faster he would have thrown himself someplace so obscure that their children's children would still be searching for him? Running out here isn't what a human would do, but Katie's right; he isn't human.

"Well, either way," Ben says when the silence drags on awkwardly long. "Jesse's a friend, okay?" He looks back at Jesse like he's checking to make sure, and Jesse's eyes narrow, assessing.

Katie raises her eyebrows. "Since when are you friends with things that can light fires with their bare hands? Or was he hiding that little detail." She doesn't raise the gun again, but it's clearly a close thing.

"Jesse's pyrokinetic," Claire says, and that's much better than what Jesse would have come up with, that's actually brilliant, and it's not even technically a lie. "Some hunters don't take kindly to that sort of thing, you know how they are."

"Some hunters don't take kindly to magic, either, but they shape up fast after a couple'a ass-whoopins," Katie mutters. When next she regards Jesse, she seems a little less combative. "And you really didn't do anything to Emily?"

"I haven't seen her at all since the bar," Jesse says, and glances at Claire to make sure she's noted the honesty. "Sorry."

Katie seems to accept this, and holsters her gun. "I just don't understand why she didn't _call_."

"She'll call," Ben says bracingly. "I'm sure she just forgot."

And indeed, before Katie can even open her mouth to reply, something in her pocket lights up and buzzes. "Holy shit," Katie says, pulling out her phone to stare at the screen, and then claps it to her ear. "Emily?"

"Wow, good timing," says Ben, but Katie has clearly forgotten all of them. Her entire face looks different, bright with relief.

"Are you ok—Yeah! No, I'm fine, I was just worried about you. What are you even doing up?—Em? Yeah, you cut out for a second there, I—hello? Can you—Where are you? Ben said you'd—oh, you did? Oh, okay, yeah, you hadn't told me and I kind of freaked, I thought—yes? Hello? I can't—no, say again, I didn't—hello?"

Katie lowers the phone again and pockets it in frustration. "Shitty signal up here," she explains. "I'm gonna go back down to the bar, try her on a landline."

"You want a ride?" Ben says, but Katie's already trotting away.

"Nah, I brought my bike. Literally only one trail of footprints to follow out here, and I wanted to catch up as fast as I could—I'll see you around, though, right?" Her voice is already fading.

"Yeah, call me after I've had some sleep," Ben yells after her, and then Katie's gone and his attention swivels back to Jesse. Ben raises his eyebrows. "So...what was that about?"

"She thought I'd kidnapped her girlfriend." Jesse's busy being appalled at her _trail of footprints_ comment; he thought he'd rid himself of that bad habit ages ago. Serves him right for getting complacent.

"Not the Katie thing, the—" Ben gestures around them. "Sudden urge to go camping in the mountains. What are you _doing_ out here, man?"

After a long pause Jesse meets his eyes, willing Ben to understand so he doesn't have to say it. But it's Claire, perceptive as always, who saves him.

"He's running away."

Ben turns from Jesse to Claire and back again. "From what? From _us_?"

Jesse's jaw clenches. "I woke up in a _hunter's bar_ ," he says, trying to inflect the words with some fraction of what that had felt like. "You two had just seen me take out five dozen hellhounds in one go. What was I supposed to think?"

That shuts Ben up. Jesse drops his eyes to the fire, ignoring the twinge of guilt at Ben's apparent shock. "Half of Hell was after us," Ben says finally. "I was trying to get us all somewhere _safe_. These people are my friends, they're not gonna—"

"Yeah, _your_ friends," Jesse cuts in. "These places are safe for _you_. I haven't been further than a few meters from a trap since I set foot in this country, all right?" The fire's right next to him, but Jesse wraps his arms around himself anyway. "I'm not a hunter. I'm not like you. Humans are more likely to hurt me than demons."

But Jesse's not naive enough to think spending a week stuck in a house together means Ben's suddenly going to understand. Right now he's just glad there are no more guns pointed at him, and tries to come up with the words most likely to keep it that way.

"Look." Jesse holds his hands up in the universal sign of surrender, making eye contact with each of them in turn. "I'm not gonna hurt you if you don't hurt me, right? Wasn't that the deal? And I don't plan to hurt anyone else, either, you _know_ that's true." He gestures at Claire, who straightens a little but gives no other sign of acknowledgement. Jesse wets his dry lips. "So you could just—leave, and I'll stay out here, and I promise—"

"Hold on just a goddamn minute," Ben says. "Okay, hunters freak you out, I get that. But how exactly does that translate to us dumping you in the desert to wander for forty years?"

"There's no one else out here," Jesse pleads. "No one's in danger, and I'll leave as soon as my powers come back, I'm sure I can hunt that demon just as easily from Victoria—"

"What do you mean, when your powers come back?" says Claire.

Was the threat of another blast wave was all that was holding them in check this whole time? He can't escape through supernatural means—and another, worse thought occurs to him. He remembers the last few minutes in the shack, those inexplicable moments when the fire drained out of him and suddenly old wounds stung like they were fresh. How low can his powers fall before his body stops healing itself?

"I don't—I don't know," he says. "I guess I stretched them too far with the hellhounds, I felt sick earlier, but they're, I mean, they're coming back. They're not _gone_."

"So you want us to leave you out here, with nothing but the clothes on your back, and you don't even have your mojo charged?" Ben says. "No. No way. We're taking you back to civilization."

"I'm not hurting anyone!" Jesse says again. He can't quite get a handle on the line of Ben's argument, and he flounders for something new to convince him.

"I know you're not hurting anyone," Ben says impatiently, and Jesse's brain fills in the _yet_. "I'm just wondering what you plan to, oh I don't know, _eat_."

Jesse glances at the dead, forgotten rodent lying in the sand beside the fire. Ben follows his gaze and squints.

"What—dude. Is that a dead squirrel?"

Jesse shrugs carefully. "I have done this before, you know."

Ben can't seem to uncurl the disgust from his lip when he says, " _Why?_ "

In the brief pause before his frustration finally gets the better of him, Jesse hears Claire sigh.

"Why?" Jesse repeats. "Why have I spent the last three years staying as far away from _civilization_ as I could go? Why did I run away from you the first chance I got? Can you honestly not think of a reason?"

Ben flushes, visible even by firelight. "Look, man, I know—"

"No. You don't. You don't know. You have no idea what happened to me, okay, so would you please just leave me _alone_?"

On the last word, the campfire flares up brighter behind him. Jesse bites the inside of his cheek and breathes.

Ben's staring at the fire too, but then he says, "So tell me."

Jesse glances at Claire, who's now staring at Ben too. "What?"

Ben shrugs, elaborately casual. "You think I don't get it, fine. I don't get it. So explain it to me."

"Use small words," Claire adds, but beneath the sarcasm lies a certain curiosity of her own. Jesse does not understand these people at all.

He doesn't like to think about how his friendship with the Simmses had ended, but maybe Ben's right, maybe he needs to tell them if he has any hope that things will go differently this time. "Fine," he says. Jesse takes a deep breath, tries to get the memories in order. "Just don't—don't interrupt."

 

* * *

 

They'd been on a hunt, Jesse and Oliver and Elias, after some slime-haired quadruped called a bunyip—and unlike drop bears, Oliver assured him, bunyips were very real. Jesse had only been with the Simms brothers for seven months, and for all they'd taught him and trained him in, actual hunts were still new enough that he'd felt flutters of excitement mixed in with the nerves, creeping along the muddy shore of the billabong.

Jesse hadn't been holding his gun, that was the first mistake—he hadn't yet internalized the Simms maxim that _your weapon is a part of you_ , though his aim was still poor enough that it might not have mattered. The second mistake was Elias crouching to examine a track imprinted in the soft ground, taking his attention off the lake. The third was Oliver's boot slipping, and his leg splashing into the water nearly up to the knee just as the bunyip's doglike head broke the surface.

Jesse remembers it in snapshots: the bunyip leaping, fanged mouth wide open; Oliver screaming his brother's name; Elias scrambling to aim his gun far too slowly. He doesn't remember ever making the decision to act, but there was his outstretched hand, there was the bunyip being flung to shore and exploding in flames. There were Oliver and Elias, staring at him with open mouths and fearful eyes.

"Jesse?" Oliver said, and then Elias rattled off something in Latin and nothing happened to Jesse and then Elias was pointing a gun at him and a second later Oliver was too.

He'd tried to explain himself, of course: it made no difference. "I just wanted to save him," Jesse said, "I saved you," but Oliver looked to Elias instead.

"That's the only reason you're still standing," Elias said. "Go. Don't come back. Just go." And Jesse, stumbling and shellshocked, had gone.

It could have ended there. Jesse still doesn't know what made them change their minds, why they decided he was too dangerous to let live after all. He'd done the same thing he did every time he moved on, walking and hitchhiking until he found someplace that'd have him. He didn't think to wipe the memories of the people who gave him rides. He hadn't covered his tracks more than the bare minimum. He'd even entertained fantasies, for a while, that Oliver might come looking for him and apologize.

The Simms family had come looking for him, soon enough. But not Oliver or Elias, and most definitely not to apologize.

Jesse was cutting through a park somewhere near Port Pirie when a burly blonde woman settled in his path and asked him for directions. He apologized, told her he was new to town, and tried to move past. She held out one large arm.

"You know two brothers, by any chance? Elias and Oliver?"

Her face was so somber that Jesse blurted, "What happened to them?"

The woman nodded and reached into her bag. "They met a monster," she said, and then upended a bottle of holy water on Jesse's head.

He'd escaped her, though barely, his parkour days coming back to him with deadly seriousness as she chased him through the nearly-empty streets. Jesse spent the night on a grocery-shop roof, afraid even to peek over the edge, but in the morning she was nowhere to be found and he was long gone.

The next time he saw her was in the diner of a tiny outpost town at the edge of the desert, and this time she wasn't alone. The man beside her, who looked like Oliver twenty years older, saw Jesse frozen in the doorway and nudged her. The woman looked up, saw him, nodded. They and their darker-blonde companion began to stand.

Jesse fled.

Most of the next month he remembers in flashes. He'd thought at first of going back to the cities, but it only took one person's memory to make hiding in a crowd useless. He refused to wipe as many minds as it would take just to get him there—he wasn't going to use his powers, not now and not ever, especially when that would just prove the hunters right. Instead he moved further and further north and hoped the desert would shield him.

The next hunter to find him, Jesse learned later, was Taylor, Oliver and Elias's closest cousin. Taylor, who attacked Jesse in his sleep. Jesse woke up with his veins hot and the body already cooling on the ground beside him. Shouting, then gunshots, as Jesse tore away—whatever he'd unconsciously done, another hunter had seen it. After that he didn't have a chance.

No food. No shelter. Sleep only in fitful naps at the hottest part of the day, always ready to wake up and run at the telltale sound of tires crunching over sand. Jesse followed a river, at first, clinging to the water all his powers couldn't produce, but he was on foot and the Simmses drove hard and finally he had to abandon even that small comfort. If he hadn't been a cambion he would have died seven times over. If he weren't a cambion he wouldn't have been running in the first place.

It was one of the worse days—hours since Jesse had seen a source of water, still no food, and barely any sleep to go on. When he saw someone walking toward him out of the setting sun, Jesse assumed he was a mirage.

But he kept blinking and the man was still there, and then Jesse said "Oliver?" and started forward before he remembered.

But Oliver didn't point a gun at him this time. "Been looking for you," he said.

"Your family," Jesse started, because it hadn't been hard to figure out with the same blond hair and turned-up nose on every new hunter. Then he saw the old Jeep and a conspicuous absence. "Where's Elias?"

"With the others," Oliver said, not quite looking Jesse in the eye. Jesse tensed to run again, but Oliver sighed. "Look, mate, whatever you are, you saved my life. You'll not last much longer out here, and I can—" He shrugs at the Jeep. "I can take you somewhere to stay for a while. Until all this gets sorted."

And Jesse had been hungry, and thirsty, and Oliver had come back for him. So he'd gone.

The place Oliver took him to didn't look like much—just a shack, one door and no windows, nestled in some scrub trees. The plywood walls looked fresh. Jesse hadn't thought much about it, already rubbing his eyes at the prospect of a real bed. "Go on, then," said Oliver, and if there was anything strange in his voice Jesse hadn't noticed that either.

He went through the door. They were waiting for him.

First holy water, an entire bucketful sloshed over him. His clothes, soaked through, kept searing against him even as the first splash steamed off his skin, and Jesse was so overwhelmed by the pain of it that at first he didn't realize his attempts to back away weren't getting him anywhere.

"Told you it was a demon," a woman spat. "How ya like that devil's trap, huh?"

"Calm down," Oliver was shouting, "calm down, we just gotta ask you some things," but someone else yelled "Like hell!" and dragged Jesse further into the shack. Another someone was reciting Latin.

"Oliver, get out of here!" And that was Elias's voice, he was here too, but he sure didn't seem inclined to stop whoever elbowed Jesse in the gut. They tried to wrestle him into a chair but Jesse broke free, running for the door, and ran into the same invisible block as before. Bodies surged up around him. Oliver was nowhere.

Another dose of holy water, less of it this time but right down the back of his neck. Jesse snarled, pressing down the flare in his veins, and human instinct took over. He loosed the knife that this family gave him, slashed an arc through the air in front of him. For a second they withdrew and Jesse firmed his grip.

But fighting just enough to escape wouldn't work with the devil's trap holding him in every direction. He thought maybe he'd do it, maybe he was capable of ending lives on purpose, but the next person to come at him was Elias and he wasn't after all. Then his knife was gone and Jesse was being held in the chair by eight foreign pairs of hands as another wrapped ropes around his stomach and between his ankles.

Silver handcuffs closed around his wrists, numbness shooting along his nerves, weighing his hands down. Jesse gasped and tugged against them uselessly. "Please," he tried, but Elias was standing in the open door looking out, and the faces around him didn't care.

They started asking him questions. What he wanted, why he was there, who he worked for, and Jesse's answers, true though they were, were unacceptable. "Demons lie," one of them sneered, flicking holy water at him again. "I'm not a demon, I didn't mean to hurt anyone!" Jesse yelled, but a woman with a broken-crooked nose waved his own knife in his face and growled, "Tell that to Taylor. Tell that to the ones you left dead."

Jesse opened his mouth to protest innocence again, and the woman swooped in. This time the holy water splashed all the way down Jesse's throat.

He screamed, and the ropes tying him to the chair started smoking. The Simmses drew back, alarmed, as Jesse thrashed. He'd sworn, he swore he was done with his powers, aside from saving Oliver he hadn't used them in years, but his powers seemed to have other plans. The ropes burned off him. Despite the handcuffs still making his arms leaden, Jesse struggled to his feet.

"Stop him," someone yelled, and the voice sounded strangely muffled in Jesse's ears. He took a staggering step forward.

A woman with wide green eyes shot Jesse squarely in the forehead. He dropped.

For a long time, Jesse thought he was dead.

But then he woke up, still in the shack, this time with his shirt missing and his arms chained to the ceiling. Oliver and Elias were gone. The other hunters were still there, muttering about no binding sigils, looking at him between every sentence. They were scared.

"Let me go," Jesse pleaded.

They didn't.

The silver bullet knocked him out longer than the steel had, and hurt more as it burrowed back out of his skull and dropped onto Jesse's bare feet. Consecrated iron rounds to his heart didn't even make him pass out, though that would have been a kindness. He tried to fake pain when they tossed salt across his chest, but they caught on quickly, moved to the next attempt. They'd take shifts, some sleeping while others moved through their arsenal, a rotating group in the corner flipping frantically through fraying books. Sometimes Elias stood by the door, overseeing, and no matter what Jesse said Elias never looked him in the eye.

Wood left holes that healed as soon as the stake was pulled out, no matter what animal's blood coated them. Silver knives were the only ones whose cuts lasted, something the Simmses took full advantage of. Jesse had a moment of hope, when they started in with banishing rituals, but between the harmless words they made sure splatters of holy water kept him awake. None of it had any effect.

The days were hard to keep track of, between the single dingy window and Jesse's occasional bullet-induced comas, but he guessed it had been about a week when one of them—Gil, his name might have been—demanded again that Elias recount the story of Jesse's powers.

"I told you," Elias said. "He threw the bunyip twenty meters and then set it up in flames. Didn't say a word, no magic whatsits on him. Like nothing I've ever seen."

"Because Oliver was going to die!" Jesse yelled. His arms were still shaking from the last dose of silver. "Your brother would be dead if it wasn't for me!"

Elias crossed into the devil's trap, closer than he'd come this whole time, leaning all the way into Jesse's space. "And Taylor would be alive."

"It was an accident," Jesse whispered. "You know me, I wouldn't do that, Elias—" The words cut off when Elias's fist connected with Jesse's face.

Elias punched him again. Jesse's lip split open, dripping into his mouth. Then again, this time to the chest, knocking the wind out of him. The stomach. The face again. "Elias," Jesse coughed, edging as far away as the chain would let him, and then the hits came so fast he lost track.

Later—maybe minutes, maybe hours—someone pulled Elias off him, told him to get some air. When he came back the next morning it was only Elias's own bloody knuckles, not Jesse's bruiseless skin, that showed it had happened at all. Elias didn't touch him again.

Jesse was never sure when the line got crossed, between trying to kill him and trying to break him. The methods got more creative; the wounds made to last longer. Some of the Simmses, fine with repeated gunshots, began to lose their nerve when a knife stayed hilt-deep in Jesse's ribs for hours at a time. From twenty or so, the number of hunters buzzing through Jesse's awareness dropped to a dozen, then a few less. He started to learn their names, though using them usually just made things worse. One name he hadn't had to use, and he was pathetically glad for that.

Probably that was his mistake.

It was March 23rd, which Jesse knew because Ross still thought he was something Unseelie and hoped the equinox would do something to him, which it hadn't. Now he was smacking Jesse with iron rods, more or less at random, just to get the frustration out. Compared to some things, it was downright relaxing.

Then Elias sat up straighter, and Alice said, "Finally decided to show your face?"

Of course it was Oliver—the real surprise was that Jesse thought, for longer than a split second, that Oliver might actually have come to save him.

"He's still not dead," Oliver said. Behind Elias's back, Alice and Ross exchanged looks.

"Not for lack of trying," said Ross eventually. "Silver and holy water are the only things even leave a dent."

Elias wasn't listening, gripping Oliver's upper arm. "I told you, you don't have to," he said, "I told you I'd take care of it," and Jesse had a moment of pure hatred that no one would ever say that to him, especially not these brothers that were somehow still the closest thing he had left to a family.

Oliver reached out and tugged off the silver band around Jesse's neck that they'd used to keep him from screaming so loud. His were the first pair of eyes to meet Jesse's in a week. "Oliver," Jesse rasped. "Please—"

Oliver picked up a machete off the wall and sliced Jesse's throat clean down to the bone. Hope is a bitter poison.

Jesse stopped trying to talk, after that.

He swore not to lose track of time again, because what felt endless wasn't really, and maybe if he remembered that he'd mind it less. Still, he spent a good hour after sunrise repeating _march twenty-ninth march twenty-ninth_ before he remembered words had meaning and figured out it was his eighteenth birthday.

Uncle Harry heated a fire poker until it went molten-red at the tip and pushed it into Jesse's side. He had received better presents.

That night, during a lull in the proceedings, Jesse suddenly started to feel dizzy. Chills and hot flashes chased each other across his skin in a way that had nothing to do with his most recent vanishing scars. He'd thrown up from things they fed him before, but they had stopped bothering with food, and this nausea refused to settle into a concrete urge to hurl. Jesse closed his eyes and shivered so hard the chains rattled.

"Hey," someone snapped, and a dash of holy water hit his face. "Are we boring you?"

Jesse blinked slowly. He couldn't tell who was speaking, couldn't quite make their faces resolve.

"What's it doing," said a higher voice. A knife slit the skin under his right shoulder. "What are you doing?"

It wasn't a silver knife—by now he could tell the difference—but this time the cut didn't seal itself. He watched a drop of blood roll unhurried down his chest. The Simmses all looked at each other.

Then it was as though every injury from the past fortnight came roaring back, pain blossoming all across Jesse's body. Something tugged at the back of his head like his spine was being pulled out through the nape of his neck. Under his screaming, he could hear the alarmed voices of the Simms family, "what did you do? what did we do?" all drawing in tighter around him like a noose. He felt a knife prod into his stomach, nick something important, and then for the first time in his life Jesse experienced a human body starting to fail.

The darkness surrounding him felt permanent this time, if he would only reach out to touch it. He felt cold for the first time in months; the well of fire he'd been holding back all this time was finally empty. If this was his life now, Jesse thought, surely death could be no worse.

He still wonders what would have happened if he'd given up just a little faster.

Instead, inexplicable, the fire came screaming back to him. It burned away his cuts and bruises, his bloodied middle, then chased out his hunger and exhaustion and fear until nothing but fire fit inside him. The handcuffs above him snapped open, and Jesse shook them off like cobwebs. The numbness was gone; the pain was gone. Everything was beautiful.

"Fuck," he heard, and another voice said, awe and fear at once, "Look at his eyes..."

These people were not his friends. They had tried to hurt him. Jesse smiled, and the fire thrumming in the base of his skull ceased to be metaphorical.

Did flames climb the walls as quickly as he remembers, or had he merely found the patience of an unstoppable force? Certainly the devil's traps peeled off in steaming pieces before he'd reached the edge of them. Certainly, there had been no time to escape. The flames started to circle the hunters just as the hunters had once circled him.

A few of them tried to harm him even then. They fell down dead and were consumed. Others beat and beat and beat against the walls, even as the vortex tightened around them and set them ablaze. The roof flew off and the spinning fire reached all the way to the clouds.

"Jesse," one of them said. The most important; the most traitorous. He had denied Jesse, three times at least before every sunrise, and the silence cut deeper than his blade. Jesse leaned in close and watched fire dancing in Oliver's eyes. "Please," Oliver said.

Gently, just like his furtive dreams, Jesse tilted Oliver's face up and pressed his mouth to his.

Fire spilled from his lips and cut off Oliver's scream before it began.

The tornado spun faster and faster, and Jesse spun right along with it, the wind whipping through his hair. The hunters mattered less than nothing now, scattered and broken around him. The walls burst outward in boards of burning rubble. The Antichrist screamed, and the storm screamed with him.

_No—_

The recoil of folding all that power away again sent him stumbling. It didn't stop the storm; the real-life fire didn't go out. The bodies didn't get up again.

Jesse Turner ran into the desert with fire at his back, and he didn't let himself turn around.

 

* * *

 

There's a long silence after Jesse stops talking. He'd dropped into a monotone as he spoke, but now the guilt and frustration comes sweeping back into the clench of his fists. "I should've been able to control myself," he says. "I didn't mean for—I didn't—"

"Are you fucking serious?" Ben says. Jesse flinches and the campfire sputters. "Dude. No. Your friends tortured you for weeks and you're mad at yourself for killing them? If ever there were a case of self-defense—"

"It's not self-defense when you're _burning people alive_ ," Jesse snaps, and saying it again just makes it worse. Fire has always been so much a part of him that he can't even imagine what Oliver must have felt, those last few minutes of his life. He's perversely grateful to the Queen for slitting his parents' throats first; if they'd died by fire too he wouldn't have been able to stand it.

Ben is still righteous with the fury only an outsider could muster. "But they were your _friends_."

" _I know!_ " Jesse shouts. His voice cracks with the leap of the campfire and he bites the inside of his cheek, hard. Who knows why Ben is defending Jesse this time, but it's still the same problem; he only sees one right and one wrong and no room for anyone who disagrees with him. _That was the whole problem_ , Jesse wants to say, but it wouldn't do any good.

"Ben," Claire says when Ben opens his mouth again, but she's looking at Jesse. "Let him be sad."

It throws Jesse off, hearing that. He feels he should protest, somehow, but isn't sure why, or where to begin. He rubs his eyes and stares at the campfire and wishes they would leave.

"I didn't say he couldn't," Ben says, a little sullen but subdued. He scratches his sneaker in the red dust. Then he sniffs. "Can we just, finish this conversation back inside? It's the middle of the night."

And Jesse tenses again. He's not going back there. He won't. He only just got free.

"Jesse doesn't want to go," Claire says, and God, can't she at least wait for him to say something before spitting the truth out there?

Ben huffs. "Yes, Claire, I can see that, _thank_ you." He runs both hands through his hair so it sticks up in chunky curls and then shakes his fingers out, bouncing twice on the balls of his feet. "But—come on, man, do you really—I mean what about the demon? We _know_ it's connected to both of us, and Emily's lead is really solid. Why don't we all just get some sleep, head out in the morning, and then, you know, we can—"

"We can what?" Jesse's voice has gone flat again. "What do you want me to do for you, exactly? Save your parents?" He looks at both of them when he says it, sees Claire's jaw tighten a fraction. He hasn't forgotten her midnight confession. She would have him use his powers. But he won't. Never again. Ben's forehead creases, but Jesse steels himself and continues, "Because I'm not going to."

"But—" Ben begins. Claire just ducks her head, eyes never leaving his, acknowledgement without surprise.

Jesse interrupts Ben again. "Are you hunting me?"

"No!" says Ben, offended.

"No," Claire echoes. She could be lying, but Jesse doesn't think she is.

"Thank you," Jesse says. The words feel bitter and ridiculous in his mouth. A gust of wind stings his face and he looks down. "Then I guess we have nothing else to say to each other."

For a minute only the fire makes a sound, crumbling low in need of more wood. "That's it?" Ben says. "You're just...done with us?"

"I'm not going back there," Jesse says, quiet but emphatic. "You can follow that demon on your own."

"I'm not talking about the case, Jesse." Ben squints at him through the darkness, eyes flicking back and forth between Jesse's, trying to see something that isn't there. Finally Ben leans back and stuffs his hands in his pockets. "Cause for a while there, I thought maybe we were starting to be friends."

He'd offered the same thing back at that hunter's house. Jesse's stomach twists up into his throat. "As you so cleverly pointed out," he says, "they were my friends too." He turns around and sits down with his back to them, vulnerable but a clear fucking sign. "Please just go."

A pause. "Good luck," Claire says, and there's nothing more from Ben, just an exhalation barely heavy enough to call a sigh. Jesse picks up his squirrel and starts skinning it. He listens to their footsteps getting fainter as blood spreads tacky and lukewarm over his fingers. The sky above him is perfectly clear. This is, after all, what he wanted.

He doesn't look away from the campfire until the glow of their headlights has faded entirely.


	5. Chapter 5

Sleep doesn't come easy, even now that Jesse's curled up on familiar sand with only his sweatshirt and embers for company. He's gotten soft, that's what it is; a few nights on that old green couch and now the rock ground has him tossing and turning, though he's safer here than he ever was in that house. He dozes for a while, but it's not more than two hours past sunrise that he gets up again and moves on.

This used to be easy. He remembers it being easy, less than two weeks ago when this was his life. There's no reason he should feel lost now. He's still too close to that hunter's bar, that's why he can't sleep. Jesse sets off perpendicular to the direction he was going when Katie found him. His subconscious must know that if they found him once they can do it again, and unlike being trapped with them in that house, it's finally decided to register that as enough threat to keep him awake.

Of course, when they found him last time, they left again.

The rocky ground gets steeper and Jesse stumbles a little. He has been caught—not just last night, but that first time a week ago, the trap in the iron room. But they're still alive, and he's still alive, and he's not trapped anymore. If he hollers, let him go.

He just can't make sense of it. It's not like they didn't want anything from him; it's not like he couldn't have been useful to them. They may be hunters but he doesn't fancy their chances against the Queen of Hell. Jesse already saved their lives once. But this time—these two had forgiven him for it.

A small animal scurries away when it sees him, and Jesse darts after it, last night's meal already a fading memory. He jumps between the rocks, ducks under scrub trees. But the creature is too fast for him, whatever it is, and vanishes down a hole he can't see. Jesse resheaths his knife and plops down on a weathered stone to catch his breath.

It's not so bad out here. Ben can turn his nose up at killing a squirrel but Jesse remembers the way he'd slurped down a can of chili like there was no tomorrow; chop the meat fine enough and he bets Ben would guzzle it just as eagerly. Claire would probably make the same face at him, too—she wouldn't be grossed out because it was roadkill, she'd be grossed out because Ben would grin at her with a big smear of it down his chin, and she wouldn't even be grossed out so much as fond and trying not to show it.

Jesse picks up one of the smaller rocks next to him and throws it. From here he can see down the mountain. He sees too that he hasn't gotten as far as he thought, because there's the outline of that damn bar, cars winking from the parking lot as the sun rises. He picks up another rock. When Ben said _friends_ what he probably meant was more like allies, coworkers, associates helping each other on a mutual problem. Maybe there's some sort of honor code there, like you can't kill the enemy of your enemy if there's a chance they'll kill your enemy first. The Simms brothers had had their family, sure, but there were others along the way, people who dropped in for a case or two and dropped right back out without a fuss. Hunting partnerships aren't exactly legal contracts.

Jesse kicks the stone back and forth a few times. His powers are back, he can feel that heated shimmer again. He could jump away, any time he wanted, and no one could stop him. He'll be more careful about devil's traps. No more need for paint remover.

Then he realizes he's trying to use a piece of sandstone as a hackeysack, and he lets the rock fall to the ground with a curse.

Okay. Maybe he's just stupid and lonely. But maybe they're not as bad as he thought.

Morning sun in his eyes, Jesse starts making his way back down the mountain.

At the edge of the parking lot he hesitates, and conceals himself behind a rocky outcropping. He can see the kitchen door, which he knows has no trap on it, but is he really going to waltz back into this place like he has a right to be there?

His uncertainty is rewarded a few minutes later when he hears voices, and then Claire herself comes around toward the familiar beige truck, Ben hauling duffels at her heels. Even luckier, they're alone. Jesse crouches a little lower to listen.

"But we don't have time to wait and see," Ben is saying. "Who knows how old those omens were when Emily heard about them, let alone when she told us, and they're only gonna get colder." There's a thud of duffel bags landing in the truck bed. "Why can't we go up there and just _see_ —"

"Because he's never going to believe we come in peace," Claire says. Jesse's insides do something funny when he realizes they're talking about him.

"He would if you said it."

"I can still tell lies, Ben." The door creaks open, and Jesse risks a glance over his rock, sure they're about to drive off. But Claire just tosses her backpack into the front seat and leans against the hood. Ben is staring away up the mountain. "Ben."

"It's killing me, man," Ben says. "He's just gonna sit up there wallowing in guilt, alone, and he's gonna tell himself he likes it because some bunch of fuckheads taught him everyone wants to kill him."

"Torture does have a way of changing how you think," Claire says, and Jesse wonders if she speaks from experience.

"It's not fair," says Ben, and it sounds like he's going to say more, but he doesn't.

"You're awfully adamant about this," Claire says presently. "As I recall, you wanted him pretty dead when you first met him too."

"It's different." Ben turns to look at Claire again and Jesse has to duck to avoid being seen, heart pounding. "Yeah, I was freaked when that exorcism didn't work, but I wasn't gonna string him up and _play_ with him."

Claire makes a noise that could mean anything.

"It's not his fault what he is," Ben says, quieter. "And, I don't know. I liked him."

Jesse sits all the way down and tries to process that revelation. Ben didn't say it to convince him of anything because he doesn't know Jesse is here. Claire isn't calling him out for lying. He might actually mean it. And what is Jesse supposed to do with that?

"We can't bring him with us if he doesn't want to come," Claire says. "No matter how much we want to."

We? Can she possibly mean she'd want him around too?

Ben sighs. "We're still hunting the same thing, though—or being hunted, I guess. You never know, we might run into him again."

It's the perfect entrance line. But Jesse stays frozen behind his rock, still just a little unsure.

"Ben, you asshole, are you leaving without saying goodbye?" comes a new voice, and then Ben and Claire are caught in a flurry of farewells and affectionate threats from Katie, the hunting waitress from last night. Jesse's adrenaline spikes when he recognizes her voice. Showing himself to Ben and Claire is one thing, but he's pretty sure Katie still doesn't trust him. She would start asking questions, and then there are other hunters inside if she doesn't like the answers—but what if Ben and Claire leave now and he loses his chance?

His fear at the thought of being this close and letting them go makes his mind up.

He peeks again and sees Claire get into the truck on the driver's side. Ben is giving Katie a hug that looks bonecrushing for both participants—then he too gets in the truck, and Katie starts heading inside.

Jesse hears the engine catch behind him as he runs to the end of the parking lot and, for lack of a better idea, sticks out his thumb.

The truck rolls slowly to a stop in front of him.

"Hi," he says, when Ben rolls down his window to stare. Behind him Claire is leaning over the wheel to watch. Jesse's heart beats double time but his powers, restored, don't even murmur; they don't think he's in danger. He tries a smile. "Think you're headed my way."

There's a very long pause, enough time for Jesse to wish he'd said anything else, though not enough to think of what that else should be. Then Ben nods, pushes open the passenger door, and slides over to give him a space.

"Guess we are," says Ben. And Jesse gets in the truck.

 

* * *

 

For the first part of the drive Ben seems energetic, even cheery, bouncing in his seat in time to the music and drumming on his legs. By the end of the first hour, though, he's fast asleep with his head tipped back against the rear window and vague puffing noises coming from his mouth. Claire catches Jesse's eye, one eyebrow quirked, and Jesse has to bite his lip to keep from giggling out loud.

"So," Claire says, and she's smiling too. "You came back."

Jesse settles a little further down in his seat. "Looks like."

He waits for her to ask why. Instead she clears her throat and says, "I wanted to apologize."

"Apologize?" But Jesse doesn't even flinch, not really; his sudden optimism amazes him.

"For bringing you to the Salt Round," she says. "It did occur to me, that you wouldn't like it. But after what happened with the hellhounds..." She trails off.

"That doesn't usually happen," says Jesse, though he can't really promise her anything. He remembers that moment of terror on her face. "I was just—overloading, and then you got holy water on me and it was just instinct, I didn't mean to hurt you."

Claire glances at him, then back at the road. "Well. I didn't know how you'd wake up and I didn't want to take the chance." She clears her throat again, like this is a speech she's rehearsed. "I made you feel unsafe so I could feel safer. And I'm sorry for that."

Jesse stares at the side of her head until it's obvious she isn't going to make eye contact, and then looks out the window instead. Hearing Claire apologize is almost as disconcerting as hearing her laugh—but beneath his bemusement and instinctive suspicion, hearing it warms him in the same way. "It's okay," he says after a long pause, and the truck is quiet again.

They run into a rainstorm somewhere in Indiana, and Ben, now awake and driving, decrees this a sign that they should pause for the night. Jesse jumps out as soon as they find a motel, glad for the chance to stretch his legs. The rain comforts him, cold though it is; his body still remembers rain as precious, still craves the blooming that follows a storm. When Claire and Ben scurry off to the room they've just gotten, Jesse lingers, blinking up at the water that won't hurt him.

This means he's alone, when he hears a low pitiful sound from beneath a vending machine.

Jesse looks around and, seeing no one, crouches down for a better look. A tiny ball of wet fur stares back at him with huge green eyes. When he reaches for it, the kitten's ears go back and it swipes at his hand.

"Ow! Fucking—" The scratches heal almost before he pulls his hand back to look at them, but they still hurt. He's lucky he can't get infected. "See if I'm helping you, then."

The kitten mews again, piteously.

No one else is in the parking lot; the rain is getting heavier. Jesse tries to outstare the kitten, cradling his hand mostly for show. "I could eat you, you know. I've had worse."

A drop of rain from the roof plops down on the kitten's back. It hisses and writhes around, trying to attack its own spine, only getting itself dirtier and wetter in the process.

Jesse sighs and reaches out again. "All right, come on."

He gets another several scratches and one very painful bite before the kitten cottons on to the fact that Jesse is warmer than the ground, and then it tries to climb up and into his sweater, rumbling thoughtfully. Jesse's still fighting the little bugger off when he gets up to the room and knocks to be let in.

Ben stares at the bedraggled kitten in Jesse's hands for several seconds before he bursts out laughing and has to go sit down. "Shut up," Jesse says, kicking the door shut behind him. The kitten bites his ear with needle-sharp teeth. "I already regret this."

"You're wetter than the cat is," Ben snorfles. He points at Jesse and says to Claire, "He followed me home, ma, can we keep him?"

"Shut up," Jesse says again, his heart jumping for a second. Stupid kitten.

He crosses to the phone and peers at the instructions while the kitten manages to wriggle free and into the hood of his red sweater. The line to the front desk cannot go through fast enough.

"Hello? Hello, I found—erm, I found a kitten in the parking lot. A gray kitten? Pretty small? Does it belong to anyone?"

The motel manager grunts, then says, "Yeah, my kid's cat just had a litter. Bring it down to the front desk, how about, and I'll take it off your hands."

"Great," Jesse says fervently, as the kitten emerges from his hood and digs its claws into his shoulder. Jesse hangs up and the movement nearly sends the kitten tumbling to its death, though it thanks Jesse for catching it by clawing his hands up again and then biting his thumb. "You little bastard."

"I think we should keep him," Ben says. "Call him Bob. Feed him with your blood, which is clearly his natural diet."

"Don't give it any ideas," Jesse says. "The desk manager said it was his kid's, anyway."

He tries to put the kitten in his pocket, but the kitten is having none of it. Jesse sighs and resigns himself to another long round of scratches. He flips his hood up over his already-wet hair and opens the door. Ben says behind him, "I'll come with you."

"It'll only take but a minute," says Jesse, surprised but pleased.

Ben just shrugs and puts on a sweater of his own. "Claire? Wanna?"

"No," she says. "I have a call to make." She and Ben exchange a look.

After a moment Ben claps Jesse on the previously-clawed shoulder. "Let's go, then." But he turns back to look at Claire as the door closes, and Jesse notices she neither pulls out her cell phone nor moves toward the landline.

"Who's she calling?" he asks as they go down the steps, but Ben just says "Ugh, this rain, no wonder Bob is so grouchy," and during the subsequent argument about whether Bob is a suitable name for feline evil incarnate, Jesse forgets the question.

The motel manager is a seedy man in his forties with greasy brown hair and a purple sweater vest. He's fiddling with something under the counter when they enter, and when Jesse says "Um, excuse me," he just sniffs and holds up a finger without looking at them. Jesse rearranges Bob—still a bad name—who's hissing now, fur all puffed out. The A/C is up way too high in here.

"Dude, we brought your cat," Ben says. The manager looks up.

"Still dragging the Braeden whelp along, are you?" he says. "But not the other one. What, did you use her up already?" He licks his lips obscenely, and his eyes turn black. Jesse's stomach drops.

" _Exorcizamus te_ ," Ben says immediately, " _omnis immundis spiritus, omnis satanica potestas—_ "

"Shut up," says the demon, and with a flick of its head Ben is pinned to the wall. It turns its attention back to Jesse. "So you have some fire in you after all, cambion. The Queen did not like what you did to her hellhounds."

"Then maybe she should come for me herself," Jesse says, "instead of sending dogs and boot-lickers." He's proud that his voice doesn't shake.

The demon just laughs. "You overestimate your importance."

"Do I?" Jesse says, though he feels more like imitating the kitten and curling into an angry, frightened ball. "How many demons were there waiting for me, exactly? How many of her hellhounds did I kill without trying?"

The demon stops smiling. "Enough," it says. "Why do you insist on traveling with these humans? If you want real power, you'll find it with the Queen."

Jesse shivers all over. The kitten yowls. "I've got plenty of power, thanks."

"But you could have more." The demon's voice goes silky. "So much more, Jesse Turner. Join our Queen, and her gratitude will be without price."

"I don't _want_ more power," Jesse snaps, suddenly sick of this front he's putting on. "I don't want _any_!"

The demon looks wrongfooted, an expression that for the first time fits the face it's possessing. Then its eyes turn black again, narrowed. "So she was right," it says. "You want to be want to be human."

Jesse doesn't say anything.

"There is a way," the demon says. "The Queen's bond with you is strong, but—"

"We do not have a _bond_ ," Jesse spits.

The demon laughs. "Don't be absurd," it says. "Had you never guessed it was the Queen who birthed you?"

"Who—" But even as the words register, Jesse knows on some gut-deep level it's true. That must be why his powers are so strong, why he'd dreamed of her when she killed his parents. There's a phantom pressure at the back of his head.

"Why do you think she's taken such an interest?" says the demon. "You are her only begotten son, Jesse, and with you she is well pleased." It sneers. "Yet you flee from her and reject her help. You have no idea what her favor could grant you."

"Could she do it?" Jesse whispers, faint hope growing in spite of himself. "Take them back?"

The demon nods. "If you surrender your powers, the bond could be broken. You would be as human as any of them." It gives that a moment to sink in. "It would pain her, but the Queen can give you what you want. I can take you to her."

Ben manages to get out a noise that Jesse's pretty sure means _no don't_ , but he's thinking about no more itch under his skin, no more accidental fires, the chance to see what kind of life he could have had. The life his parents wanted for him.

Until their own lives were cut short by the same demon.

"No," Jesse says.

The demon waits for a few seconds, then tuts when Jesse doesn't take it back. "Here's the thing," it says, and brings its hands out from behind the desk. "I wasn't really asking." And with superhuman strength it throws a net into the air towards Jesse.

Jesse flings his hands up and fire sparks behind his eyes.

But neither Jesse nor the demon have counted on Ben. Still unable to speak but faster than Jesse thought he could be, Ben knocks Jesse aside, bringing his other arm up to slash at the net. The knife gets caught and so does Ben, entangled, but Jesse's free.

"You ungrateful little brat!" the demon screams at Ben. Its voice rises in pitch, takes on that same ventriloquist quality it had at the hunter's house. "Why didn't your mother kill you when she wanted to? So many times she wanted to, but you're still here being a _pain in my ass_!" And just as Ben struggles upright again, the demon leaps on him.

"Leave him alone!" Jesse hears himself yell, and the demon flies backward. The air smells like sulfur. Jesse has no idea where this urge is coming from, to defend, to _protect_ , but he strides forward and pulls the demon upright and he's not going to stop, he's—

Tiny claws dig into his shoulder.

A very strange feeling passes over Jesse then. He comes back to himself, but he can feel his powers too, purposeful in a way they never are, waiting for him instead of the other way around. The demon cowers in his grip, eyes black, but Jesse feels completely calm.

"Get out," he says. He thinks of Claire. "Leave this body unharmed, with no memory of you."

No taunts, no rebellion this time; black smoke gushes from the hotel manager's mouth and ripples toward the door. Jesse stops it with an upraised hand, half of his mind still marveling that he can do this. Behind him, Ben struggles free of the net and lunges at the smoke cloud with a knife that passes clean through.

"Fuck," Ben says, and his next swing is shakier. "Fuck, Jesse, you can't let it go, you can't let it get away, _please_ , this one killed my mom, I need—" He slices the smoke again with a muffled cry.

Jesse feels his control starting to slip, and he can't tell yet which way it's going to fall, but he can't watch Ben like this and do nothing. The Queen of Hell is so far away but he has another demon here in his grasp, like a living chunk of his own wrongness pulled out of him and held at his mercy.

"It's okay," he says vaguely, thinking of his own mother. "I can—" A twist of his hand, the sharp _pull_ of his powers, and then the demon smoke bursts into nothing.

Like letting out a breath he didn't know he was holding, Jesse feels his powers wash away back to where they came from. He totters over to the desk and leans against it for a few seconds until the tremors work themselves out of his legs.

"You just," Ben says. Jesse turns around and there's something new about the way Ben's looking at him.

"Sorry," Jesse guesses, though for the first time when apologizing for his powers he finds he doesn't really mean it. Ben shakes his head and wipes a hand over his face. Then he pulls himself together, and when he looks at Jesse again he laughs.

"I can't believe you're still holding that fucking cat, man."

Bob knocks his face against Jesse's cheekbone and yowls. Jesse pulls the cat off his shoulder and cradles him, strangely defensive; he doesn't know what would have happened if Bob hadn't clawed him and brought him back to himself. "What was I supposed to do? Lob him at the demon like a furry little grenade?" Bob bites him. "Oi. I didn't say I'd ruled it out."

The hotel manager groans, and his eyes flutter open. Quickly Ben kicks the net partway under a chair. "What?" the man mumbles, rubbing his eyes. "What happened? Wh—" He tries to get to his feet and slips.

Ben's at his side in an instant. "Are you okay, sir?" he asks, helping him to his feet. "That was a nasty fall you took just there. Do you feel dizzy? Should I call an ambulance?"

"I don't—" says the manager, blinking at Ben. "Are you here to check in?"

"We found your cat," Ben says, and gestures at Jesse. Jesse holds up Bob as proof.

"Oh," the hotel manager says. He frowns at Jesse, but the demon seems to have done its job; no recognition comes into his eyes. "Well—thank you." He reaches for the cat.

"He bites," warns Jesse, but when the man scoops Bob out of Jesse's hands, Bob curls up and purrs smugly without so much as a claw. Little bastard.

"I'm going to—put him with the others," the manager says. Bob purrs louder. Still looking dazed, the manager wanders off.

"Quick, we gotta hide the net," Ben whispers. He ducks down and starts pulling it out from beneath the chair, but if the strain in his arms is any indication, that thing is heavy. "Help me."

Jesse would really rather not, actually, but he moves forward anyway. As soon as he touches the net he regrets it.

"What? What happened?" says Ben when Jesse snatches his hand back, trying to shake the numbness out of it.

"Silver," Jesse says tersely. If what this demon said is true, the Queen must know all about his weaknesses. "They made it for me."

Ben looks down at the pile of it in his arms. "If I get demon cursed cause of this I'm gonna be so pissed." He doesn't put it down, though, and shoos away Jesse's uncertain apology. "Just go hold the door open, will ya? We can't leave it here where anyone can see it. Come on." Slowly and awkwardly, he drags the net outside and clinks across the wet pavement.

"We're keeping it?" Jesse says doubtfully. It says something, probably, that it takes him another minute to wonder how well Ben could use it on him.

"Claire can help me move it later, if it's not cursed," Ben says. "She'll be able to tell. Let's go see if she's done."

"Done?" Then Jesse remembers: she'd been making a call. He trots after Ben through the rain. "Who was she talking to?"

Ben pauses to let Jesse catch up, wet though it is, and chews his bottom lip. "Castiel," he says finally. "She's trying to call Castiel."

A blank second passes, then Jesse remembers: Castiel, the angel, her father's angel. "I thought she hated him." Though _hate_ seems too simple a word, to describe that ferocious hope she's hiding, or the way she talked about Castiel and said _we_.

"She does. Or did. Or wants to, I don't know." Ben lowers his voice. "Cas was on Dean's side, I'm pretty sure, and he might be able to help us with Purgatory, but I don't think that's why Claire really wants him to show up." He sighs. "She's—complicated."

Understatement. "That must make it hard," says Jesse, trying to be sympathetic.

Ben looks confused. "Make what hard?"

"You know." Jesse shrugs, entirely casual. "Dating her or whatnot."

"Oh, no," says Ben. "Hah. No. We're not dating. Nothing like that." His face has gone a little redder, though, and Jesse knows what he sees whenever Ben looks at Claire; they still might as well be spoken for.

"Complicated?" Jesse says.

"Exactly," says Ben with a relieved grin, and they leave it at that.

Claire opens the door when they knock, and no one else—angelic or otherwise—is with her. She looks at their rain-soaked faces and the net in Ben's arms. "What happened."

"More demon fuckery," Ben says cheerfully, dumping the net in front of her and closing the door. "Our good friend from Bobby's seems to have followed us here. Is this cursed? Did I get it on me?"

"Did it say the same things as before?" asks Claire, crouching to inspect the net. "This just looks like silver."

"It is," Jesse says. "If they couldn't convince me to go willingly they were gonna take me anyway."

"You should've seen," says Ben, shucking first his wet jacket, then the t-shirt beneath it. Jesse double-takes a little bit but Ben keeps talking. "Jesse just pulled the fucker right out of its meatsuit and _crushed_ it. The guy wasn't even hurt." He beams. "It was awesome."

The net rattles in Claire's hands as she looks up. "So you can kill demons."

"Uh." Jesse hadn't really thought of it like that. What happened to that promise of not using his powers anymore? He hadn't even hesitated. "I guess."

"And," Ben says, "the demons totally don't want us to go to Purgatory, so there's definitely _something_ there."

Privately Jesse thinks that might be overly optimistic—when the demon told him not to bother with Purgatory, it was just trying to get Jesse to come along with it, no matter what reasoning it had to give. It would have said anything that it thought might work. Who knows if it's even possible to turn a cambion human.

Ben's jeans hit the floor with a wet squelch. Knowing they _aren't_ dating yet makes Jesse surprised Claire hasn't reacted to this increasing lack of clothes, though admittedly Jesse is not so much paying attention to her right now. "Dude, aren't you soaking?" Ben adds to Jesse. "Why don't you change?"

Jesse's face feels hot in a way that has nothing to do with his powers. "Don't have anything to change into," he mutters, though now he's paying attention his clothes do itch, clammy and heavy where they stick to him.

"You can borrow some." Ben pulls one shirt out of his duffel and slings it around his own neck, then tosses another to Jesse. "I think that shirt you've got on is mine anyway."

Jesse's clothes feel even weirder, hearing that, but it's not like he hasn't been wearing the Simmses' castoffs for years. He retreats to the bathroom to peel off his red sweater and Ben's other shirt, and after debating it for a moment, kicks off his sopping jeans as well. He's not quite ready to follow Ben's dress code, but maybe he can wring them out a bit.

When Jesse picks the jeans up, though, he hears the metallic clatter of a coin falling out of a pocket. He hasn't picked up any pennies recently, has he? His dad's wallet didn't have any change.

But it's not a penny, he discovers when he investigates further. The metal is dark brown, but thicker than American or Australian money, and lopsided in a way machines wouldn't make. There are letters on it he's never seen before. All Jesse can tell is that this coin is old. Very old.

"Guys?" he calls, still squinting at it as he wanders out of the bathroom. Ben's wearing a shirt now, though still no jeans. Jesse doesn't register that he himself is wearing nothing but boxers until he sees Claire's eyebrows go up. Shit.

He hunches over his bare stomach and holds the coin out. "Uh. I found this in my pocket."

Claire gives Ben a silencing look before Ben's grin even has a chance to fully form, which is just as well, because Jesse would hate to discover after all this that cambions can die of embarrassment. "Give it here," Claire says, and Jesse drops it in her palm.

"I'm just gonna," he says, and bolts back into the bathroom, where he puts on Ben's t-shirt and his own wet jeans and the sweater, too, just for good measure. When he reemerges, Ben looks vaguely disappointed.

Claire puts a finger to her lips and holds up a note on hotel stationery. _It's a spy-coin. Demons are listening. That's how they found us._

Alarmed, Jesse mouths, _What are we gonna do?_

Claire's lips quirk. _Trust me._

"I don't think we should go to Centralia," she announces.

"What? Claire!" Ben says, deeply betrayed. "This is our first new lead in months!"

She flicks his forehead and points at the coin. Her voice gives nothing away as she replies, "If you're right that demons are keeping something there, it'll be guarded. I don't like the odds of going up against the Queen of Hell a second time."

Slowly, comprehension dawns on Ben's face. "Oh." He's going to have to play along better than that if this is going to work, but Jesse can't tell him as much without the coin picking it up. Luckily Ben figures it out a few seconds later. "But what if Sam and Dean are stuck there?"

"Purgatory is too dangerous to mess around with," says Claire. "Especially without any real proof." She pauses and widens her eyes at Ben.

"But," Ben says, a little too loud, and she cuts him off before he has to come up with something to follow that with.

"No, Ben. _If_ we find out that's where they went, we'll have to look for another way." She stands and puts a finger to her lips again. "Now come on. We've been driving all day and I want to sleep." And then, creeping catlike to the door, she steps outside and hurls the coin far out into the parking lot.

"Good thought," says Jesse, still quiet just in case.

"Good _arm_ ," says Ben, nudging past her and leaning over the balcony. "Damn, I think you got it to the trees."

"Hopefully they'll think the silence is us sleeping and not the result of a trick," Claire says, herding Ben back inside and locking the door. She's already laid a line of salt. "I should probably have waited longer but I don't—like it. Knowing they can always hear." She gives a jerky shrug.

"Trust me, I'm not thrilled myself," says Ben. "Just to be clear, we _are_ going to Purgatory, right?"

Claire sighs. "What I said is true, you know. If you're right then we'll definitely have demons waiting for us."

Ben flops back onto the bed nearest Jesse. "But isn't that the point? To draw out the Queen of Hell so we can kick her ass?" He rolls his head to look up at Jesse. "Shouldn't be too hard. She really wants to get her hands on you, man."

Jesse shudders and touches his wrist. He remembers how it felt to have her hands on him. "I wish I'd killed her in Alliance."

"What, and miss out on all this fun?" Ben sits up and nudges Jesse's leg with his bare knee. "Hasn't been all bad, right?"

Fun. Jesse stares at the silver net curled at Claire's feet. If he'd killed the Queen the first time he met her, he wouldn't have spent the last three weeks scared half to death—traps, demons, hellhounds, hunters, all his worst memories laid out for him to relive. He'd probably be back in his desert, alone and still so used to it that he'd be happy that way. Ben, Claire...they complicate things.

But can he honestly say he'd rather have left them in a Nebraska diner none the wiser, and never thought about them again? Would getting revenge for his parents have been worth losing this fragile tentative thing he feels growing?

And that question isn't just hypothetical. Once the Queen is dead, the three of them will have no reason to stay together anymore. At the end of the day Claire and Ben are still hunters, and Jesse's still a monster, and that's not going to change no matter how many hours they share on the road.

Unless...

"That's right," Jesse says, mind moving faster than his mouth. Whatever expression Ben just made, he missed it. "This way I still have a chance—I mean if she'd really do it, if that demon was telling the truth—"

Claire interrupts, "Jesse, what are you talking about?"

Oh. He's talking to himself. "The Queen's still alive," he says, gesturing at Ben. "The demon said she could—that maybe there's some way for me to, you know, correct myself. Be human."

Ben and Claire look at each other, and Jesse's getting awfully tired of that, the connection between them that he's not part of. But maybe he could be, if he can find a way to make this work.

"You really meant that, huh?" says Ben. "Not wanting more power?" He's still glancing at Claire for cues, and Jesse figures it out: she'll know if he's lying. He turned the demon's offer down, but Ben still doesn't quite trust him. Because Jesse's a monster.

"I'd give it up in a second if I could," Jesse says, and there's nothing truer than that.

He'd think it would make them happy to hear it. Their entire job is to get rid of things like him. But Claire's frowning, and Ben's still watching her, chewing his lip.

"What exactly did the demon say?"

Does she think he's lying too? "It said—it said the Queen and I have a bond, but it could be broken." He tries to remember the exact phrasing. "That if I gave up my powers, she could break the bond. And then I'd be human. Just a normal, fully human—person."

Ben bites his lip again and it's a little distracting when Jesse is trying to convey his utmost sincerity to Claire. "Demons lie," Ben says, but he sounds uncertain.

"I can't tell if the demon was lying," says Claire. "I can only tell if Jesse thinks he's telling the truth. Which you do, so there's no need to keep looking at me like that."

"But even if it is true, there's gotta be a catch somewhere, right?" says Ben. "I mean, the demon was trying to get you to go off with it, so it told you what you wanted to hear. They're not just gonna fix you out of the goodness of their hearts."

"Demons probably think being turned human _is_ a catch," Jesse says, more forcefully than he means to. "After what I did to those hellhounds, I should think they'd be glad to see me lose my powers. Why's it have to be more complicated than that?"

"You said a bond." Claire's fingers tighten on her thighs. "Did the demon happen to mention who you'd be giving your power to?"

If his powers are gone, who cares where they go? Any chance for Jesse to stop being what he is would be one worth taking. But the question finds the weak points in his certainty and digs in. When the Queen of Hell touched him he didn't just feel cold; he was dizzy, nauseous, sick in a way his body never gets. _Weak._ The Queen had been able to touch Jesse's mind through their bond, however remotely. If she really is the one who fathered him, half of his very essence comes from her. With Claire's blue eyes pulling honesty from him, he remembers that the demon's actual wording was _surrender._

"Her," he says dully. It makes too much sense not to be true. "It'll go back to her." He lowers himself onto the bed and lets his head drop into his hands.

"So that's it, then," says Ben, quiet realization. "She means to suck you dry, and she's got exactly the right thing to offer you for it."

The silence stretches on. Then Claire asks, "Are you going to?"

" _Fuck_ you," Jesse says abruptly, standing up again. "You can't just ask me that like it's—like I'm just going to—she killed my parents and she made me watch!"

"Jesse," she starts, but he cuts her off.

"No! My whole life I've been wishing there was some way to undo this. All I want— _all_ I want—is to be human again. Stop setting fires in my sleep. Stop being afraid of holy water and devil's traps. Stop being _hunted_ any time I let my guard down. I thought I'd be like this forever, and now I find out there is a way for me to be normal, but it means I'd be giving all this stupid power to the demon that killed my mom and dad. When I swore I was gonna kill her. It's _not fair_."

Jesse's voice gives out at the last word and he can feel his mouth shaking. Claire starts to say something, but no words come out. Jesse just stands there swallowing harshly until Ben leans down and digs something out of his duffel bag.

"Hey," he says. "Lemme show you something." He comes and stands next to Jesse.

"What?" Jesse sniffs, but curiosity helps him stave off actual tears. Ben holds up a battered photograph.

"That's my mom," Ben says, handing him the picture. Jesse takes it with instinctive reverence. Ben clears his throat. "When I saw her die, man, I felt like nothing was ever gonna be okay again. For a while there I couldn't even talk. And I wanted to kill the thing that hurt her, same as you."

The woman in the picture is very pretty, mid thirties or so, with dark eyes and tumbling brown hair. She's looking down into the camera like it was held at child's height, clearly caught in the middle of something, wrinkling her nose and sticking her tongue out around a smile that's just like Ben's. Jesse swallows.

"That demon," says Ben, gesturing at the silver net. "I've been hunting since I was a kid, and I still couldn't fight it. But _you could_."

Jesse meets Ben's eyes and has to look away again, confused and a little scared by what he sees there.

"D'you have any idea what that was like to see? You killed the demon that killed my mom. That was fucking _amazing_ , Jesse." Ben nudges his arm until Jesse looks up at him again. "Hey. Look, you're right. It's not fair. And I wish you could be human, I do, it would make a lot of things easier—but your powers can do good stuff, too."

Jesse shakes his head, but that's mostly autopilot. Inside, Ben's words are fighting with half a lifetime's deep self-hatred. He knows he's capable of terrible things; he has only to think of Oliver to know that's true. But he's saved people too, hasn't he? When he'd killed that demon, it felt different. Purposeful. Almost like justice.

They'll be in Centralia tomorrow; the Queen will be waiting. Should he give his powers to her, let her escape unpunished, to become the human son his parents always thought they had? Or should he kill her, _destroy_ her, for what she did to his family, for creating him in the first place, stop her from ever hurting anyone again—but resign himself to being this way forever?

He doesn't know. His parents always told him to fight evil wherever he found it, but what would they have said if they knew he was made of evil himself? They never realized what they were sheltering and now he has no idea what they would want him to do.

As though he can hear Jesse's thoughts, Ben says, "You'll make the right call."

 _I don't know what that is_ , Jesse thinks. He can't look too close at Ben's strange confidence; the Antichrist burns when faith touches him.

Nobody says much the rest of that night, each deep in their own thoughts. The rain starts up again even heavier than before, and Ben flat-out rejects Jesse's offer to sleep in the truck—or indeed the floor. "Trust me," he says, throwing open the corner of his bed as he burrows in the other side. "On my list of unfortunate bed partners you don't even rate." To all appearances, he then proceeds to pass out.

Jesse catches Claire's eye as he's gingerly lifting the covers, and he wonders again how reciprocal Ben's crush on her really is, if he's somehow infringing on her territory. She looks away as soon as she realizes he's watching her.

"It's okay to want not to be different anymore," she says after a moment. Then she turns the lights out, and leaves Jesse to his uneasy dreams.

 

* * *

 

Morning is a cold and equally quiet affair. The silver net gets stashed in a dumpster, the hotel manager gets a ridiculously large tip, and then they're on the road.

Without a cloud of demons overhead or the adrenaline of fleeing a hunters' bar, riding in the truck is almost relaxing. Jesse even catches Claire's eyes sliding shut once or twice, though her posture stays rigidly straight between him and Ben. When Ben suggests that she just go ahead and sleep—the "on my shoulder" unstated but heavily implied—Claire sits up instead.

"So, Purgatory," she says loudly. Behind her Jesse sees Ben roll his eyes. From the glove compartment, Claire carefully pulls out an ancient leatherbound book. "Don't try to touch this, Jesse," she warns.

It takes Jesse a moment to make out the symbol embossed on the front, but when he does, he flattens himself back against the door of the truck. That's a devil's trap.

"It isn’t going to trap you." Claire catches his eye. "The symbol is too small. All this will do is prevent you from opening the book."

That does not make Jesse feel better. He pulls his arms into his lap.

"Is that Colt's journal?" Ben asks. "Tell Jesse about Centralia."

“I’m getting there.” Claire opens the book and flips to a section near the end. "For reference, Purgatory itself isn't exactly what Dante had in mind, since as far as we can tell nothing goes on to Heaven through it. Or anywhere, for that matter. Whether the things inside are purging themselves is a matter of debate." She flicks to the next page. "The place is overflowing with ghosts. Anything human that got turned, anything born monster, when they die their spirits end up there."

Jesse always figured it'd be straight to Hell for him, assuming anyone ever finds a way to keep him dead, but it sounds like the rules are a little more complicated than that. Is he a born monster? Will he split in half, one demon and one warped semi-human that would never make it into Heaven?

Claire settles into the businesslike tone she'd used during their siege. "As for Centralia, that particular gate saw one of the few instances of Purgatory opening, almost exactly a hundred and fifty years ago.”

"Samuel Colt saved the day," Ben interjects. "Because he is _King Badass_. I bet even you heard about him, Jesse, if those other hunters knew anything about anything."

"Um, not really." The Simmses had been more concerned with making sure he could handle a knife than teaching him about other hunters, especially American hunters from a century back. Seeing Ben scoff, Jesse adds defensively, "They probably just didn't get to it before...everything."

" _Anyway_ ," says Claire, "Colt had help. This last part was written afterwards, by a hunter named Eliza Elkins. The gate at Centralia was open, and—quote—'a great fire sprung up beneath the very earth, and monsters of all kinds came out from the Gate, but in spirit only, so they could not be killed. Had Samuel Colt not been with me we would all have surely died.' "

"Badass," says Ben again.

Claire settles in to read. " 'Being knowledgeable in the ways of spirits, I was able to keep them at bay with salt and flaming arrows while Colt worked. His spell was unfamiliar to me—I suspect he invented it as I watched. I have never had my mother's head for spells, and could not have heard every word in any case as there were a multitude of screaming creatures upon us. Nevertheless the spell's result, as I understood it, erected a barrier over the Gate, so that even as it stood open no more monsters should spill from it.' "

"Like a devil's trap," Jesse murmurs to himself, but Claire hears him, and pauses. Embarrassed, Jesse turns and stares out at the cornfields blurring past his window.

"What'd he say?" Ben asks, but Claire shakes her head and keeps reading.

" 'But the spirits that had first escaped still gathered around us like wolves to an unguarded flock. At this point I had used 34 arrows and had only 8 remaining, and was furthermore running low on matches. Colt took a journal from his coat and began scribbling furiously with a clerk's pencil, recording what he had done. I tore off the hem of my skirt and attempted to fashion a torch from a large branch beside me. Without oil the fabric burned quickly and the branch only smoldered, but I was able to wield it as a sword against the smaller spirits and save my arrows for the more dangerous attackers.' Wow," Claire interjects. “Eliza didn’t fuck around.”

"Everyone was a badass back then, otherwise they got eaten by bears," Ben says wisely. "Get back to the part about Colt."

"All right, try to contain the hearts in your eyes." Claire thumbs gently through the pages. "Fight scene, fight scene—here we go. 'At last Colt finished writing, and gave his journal to me. "The barrier will hold," he said. "But these pests need to be put back in their place." Purgatory's Gate, I suppose, is like many such dread doorways, and thirsts for blood. I soon realized his intention, but Colt shook off my attempts to stop him. His final words, which I did not understand then or now, were: "What's one more death?" So saying, he crossed through the Gate himself. With his exit from this world, all the monsters' spirits were sucked back from whence they came, and the Gate closed again.' " Claire lets the journal drop to her lap.

Jesse stares down the highway ahead of them. They're _going_ to that place, the "dread doorway" that seems all too likely to want _their_ blood, and Jesse feels less and less certain that their plan to draw out the Queen of Hell is actually going to work. What if she decides to just sit back and let the gate do her work for her?

"As far as we know, the barrier is still there," Claire says. "But the gate can only be opened once every fifty years anyway, and no one seems very eager to test it out."

"He came up with magic that strong _on the fly_ ," says Ben, enraptured. "And then he walked into Purgatory without even flinching, man, that is so _cool_."

"That's not cool at all," Claire says sharply. "Martyrdom is _selfish_. Who knows how much more good he could have done if he'd kept himself alive? People shouldn't be allowed to throw themselves away for other people and then pretend like it's some noble admirable thing because it's _not_." Her fingers curl white-knuckle tight and she stops talking.

The silence becomes more awkward the longer it stretches. Finally Ben clears his throat and tells Jesse, "Anyway, we figure Sam and Dean must've been causing the Queen a lot of trouble. It’d make sense for her to throw them in a hole that can only be opened twice a century."

Claire’s voice is entirely clear of inflection when she adds, "The dates add up. The Winchesters vanished three years ago, right around the last time the gate could have been opened: March 29th, 2016."

Jesse bangs his knee on the underside of the dashboard.

"What?" say Ben and Claire in unison. Jesse rubs his knee and tries to pass it off with "nothing, sorry, go on," but Claire glowers and says, "I can hear you."

"It's—that's my birthday," he mutters, which is true. Ben is the one who remembers what that means.

"Didn't you say it was your birthday when you went all flaming vengeance on those asshats?"

"You mean when I killed the closest thing I had to friends?" Jesse snaps. "Yeah. Awesome party."

"They were _not_ your friends," Ben begins, but before Jesse can argue the point, Claire cuts in.

"How long ago was that? What year?"

Jesse scuffs the floormat with the toe of one boot. "2016," he finally answers. When he looks up Ben and Claire are giving each other significant looks.

"Same as those omens, remember?" Claire murmurs, getting out the iPad. "It's connected to Jesse somehow."

"I didn't do anything," Jesse protests, except of course how would he know? When his powers dropped and then came back like that, he was overflowing. What if the fire tornado had only been the most immediate in a whole chain of disasters? Could he ever be really sure it wasn't?

"No," says Claire, and holds up the screen for him to see. "But we can track the one who did."

Jesse's sure the map she's showing him would be a lot more impressive if he were a real hunter, but even he can tell the clump of marks around his hometown means nothing good. "That's the Queen?" he guesses, feeling a faint chill. The key in the corner says things like _lightning storm_ and _mutilated cattle_.

Claire nods. "Guess this wasn't the first time she's gone looking for you."

It strikes Jesse then: the Queen had known his parents lived in Alliance. She _remembers_ him, when no one else does. He'd been so strong, when he left home, before he'd realized the need to suppress himself. He'd wanted every single memory of himself gone, and thus it had been so. But not the Queen's. Because she's so powerful? Because of their bond? What if his powers won't work on her at all?

Claire swipes to another map. "Now look at Centralia, on the same day."

Jesse leans over her shoulder. The signs that looked so ominous surrounding Alliance are intensified here, portents piled one on top of the other until even the name of the town is obscured.

"March 29th," says Claire. "That's where she was."

"And if that's where she was, that's where Sam and Dean are." Ben slaps the steering wheel. "We're gonna save them. I just know it."

Unbidden, Jesse remembers what the demon he killed had said—that Ben doesn't actually know whether Dean is his father or not. From his own brief memories of the Winchesters, he wouldn't have guessed they knew much about kids. He wonders, then, where Ben's fierce loyalty comes from. What's so special about Dean?

"What does that have to do with Jesse, though?" says Claire, who's now flipping screens too quickly for Jesse to follow. "If she'd just locked the Winchesters away for good—and obviously angels can't rescue them there, or he would have—why go for Alliance right after?"

They're missing something here. It's true Jesse doesn't care what happens to the Winchesters, but the events of his eighteenth birthday were unusual even for him. He can't believe it's coincidence.

Well, he and the Queen do have some connection—he doesn't want to call it their _bond_ , but he's seen what it can do to him. That vision of his parents' death—he'd felt like he was watching himself do it, but really he'd been watching through the Queen's eyes, the memory somehow sent from her mind to his across that mysterious link. Their one brief encounter in Alliance showed that she can use it against him physically as well as mentally. When else has he felt so weak?

Well, most recently the Salt Round, talking to Emily and trying not to panic, but that was after he'd killed dozens of hellhounds with one blast. The time before that—

"I think I felt her," says Jesse slowly. "In the shack. Right before my powers went out." He rubs the back of his neck. "If she was opening the gate—"

"The power transfer," Claire realizes. "Whatever energy she was using, it must have come from you."

Jesse wraps his arms around himself. "Can she do that? Just reach in and grab some whenever she wants?" It's a horrifying thought. Sure, he doesn't exactly want his powers for himself, but the memory of standing in the Salt Round and not being able to jump away is too vivid for him to feel anything but trapped.

"That's probably why she came looking for you. Her own personal Energizer Bunny." Ben starts humming some sort of jingle but quickly stops at the look Claire gives him.

"If she could find you by that, Jesse, she wouldn't have left you alone this whole time," says Claire. "She went to Alliance, not Australia. She's been trying to bait you because she doesn't know where you are. She can't see you." She almost sounds jealous.

That would make Jesse feel better, except for how they're driving toward the gate of a mysterious and hostile dimension specifically to draw the Queen out.

"Well—maybe it'll work in your favor?" Ben tries. "It oughta go both ways, the bond." He brightens. "Hey, maybe you can break it yourself!"

"Except if I give my powers up, _she_ gets them," Jesse points out bitterly. He flexes his fingers and he can just feel the taint in his pulse.

Ben shifts and the truck speeds up a little. "We'll find a way to fix it," he says. "After all this is over."

 _You don't know that_ , Jesse wants to say. He knows neither of them have dealt with anything like him before. But in spite of himself, he does believe they'll try, and that's better than he should hope for.

"Okay," he says instead. Centralia is only a few more hours away, and Ben's right. Jesse's humanity will have to wait.


	6. Chapter 6

_WARNING: HAZARDOUS AREA. DO NOT ENTER._

The road starts getting rougher as soon as Ben eases the truck past the first roadblock, Claire dragging the chain back into place behind them. Jesse feels his teeth jostling in his skull with every crack in the asphalt they fail to avoid. On the ground, someone has spraypainted the words _Highway to Hell_.

"Ugh, sorry," Ben says ten minutes later, pulling over. "I'm gonna blow out the suspension if I keep driving."

So they climb out of the truck and arm up to go it on foot. Ben and Claire have at least two handguns apiece, plus rifles, and that's just what Jesse saw them load. "You want one?" Ben asks, noticing his gaze.

"Think I'd do more harm than good," Jesse says honestly. He pulls his knife out of his belt and gives it a spin.

"Knives won't really work on ghosts," Claire points out, but maybe she remembers his wild aim better than Ben because she doesn't suggest he take one of their shotguns. Instead, after a brief hesitation, she hands Ben a flask and tucks another into her belt.

"All right," says Ben. "Let's see if we can find that black-eyed fucker calling herself Queen."

The land they walk through seems almost ordinary at first. Trees grow in a messy tangle along the side of the road; weeds push up through the cracks in the pavement. It's greener here than it was in Colorado, and if there's fire beneath them now, Jesse can't feel it.

But when they get further into town, the signs of decay are more evident. They pass a school with boards over every window, a church with slats missing from the walls. One house sags so much under the weight of mold and vines that its roof has caved in. Jesse shivers. The streets are utterly empty.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," murmurs Claire, but nothing answers. They walk on.

The air is getting colder. Jesse turns left at the next cross-street without really knowing why. The overcast sky seems darker now, the outlines of the far-off hills grayer and less distinct. A little ways further, half the road shears off into a hole waist-deep, billowing steam.

"Wanna poke a stick in and see what happens?" Ben says, and Claire rolls her eyes. But he gives the sinkhole a wide berth as they edge around it.

Jesse's feet don't hesitate to take them even further into the zone of destruction, steam hissing from the fissures now. He can't tell if the hint of sulfur is his imagination or not, whether it's traces of the Queen or just the result of his own tension ratcheting higher. They're getting close.

Beyond a fence at the end of the cracked road they see a field in which absolutely nothing grows. Long fractures trace across the dry ground like weak clay in an oven. "There's something here," says Claire, as Jesse grabs the fence and heaves himself over.

He knows they've found it as soon as he lands: the heat pushes up through his thick-soled boots all the way to his suddenly queasy stomach. Several meters ahead, the ground dips, and the hollow is so filled with fog that Jesse can't make out anything past it. The fence rattles behind him, and then Claire appears at his shoulder, Ben only moments behind her. Both have their guns raised. Jesse remembers his mistake with the bunyip and holds his knife a little tighter.

"Well, if it isn't our crown prince," says a hissing voice. A woman appears from the fog in front of them. "And he's brought snacks."

"Is that her?" Ben whispers, but Jesse shakes his head. He's cold, yes, but only in his face and fingertips, and that feeling is rapidly falling to the push of heat through his blood that seems to come from the earth itself. He takes a step forward.

"Where's the Queen?"

"My, someone's eager." The demon folds its arms across its considerable chest and taps its chin, feigning confusion. "Are you sure you're the cambion? Because I heard that _he_ —" It leans forward to stage-whisper. "Likes to run _away_."

Jesse's jaw clenches. "Seems more like she's the one scared of me."

The demon laughs. "You tell yourself that, sugar." And then, with no dramatic flourishes, no warning at all, another demon tackles Claire from behind.

Claire's _fast_. Jesse hasn't really seen her fight close quarters since she fell through a ceiling on top of him, and he experiences the same mix of terror and awe in watching her now; she's even more ferocious against someone she knows for sure is her enemy. After several blows have been exchanged, though, he notices that she's not firing her gun—hitting the demon with it, yes, but she has yet to do anything that would be fatal to a human. With a jolt Jesse realizes that she's trying to keep the host body alive.

"Get the hell off her!" Ben yells, though at least he has enough sense not to throw himself on the both of them. Instead he fumbles out the flask Claire had given him when they got out of the truck and throws its contents in a wide arc. Jesse flinches out of the way.

The demon's face jerks up, steaming, and Jesse sees that its young male body has the same blunt nose and thick eyebrows as the woman; they could easily be mother and son. He turns back toward the woman, expecting another attack, but she’s already running away with her hands clapped over her ears; like no true mother would, she's abandoned her son to the hunters.

"Oh no you don't," Jesse mutters, and takes off after her. He leaps and catches her in a tackle that would have made any Simms proud, struggling to keep her arms pinned against her sides as he drags her back over to the fight.

Ben's chanting in Latin, fast, and these demons don't have the power to stop his voice; Claire keeps hers busy with sharp jabs to the stomach and neck until it's too late. Smoke comes pouring out of the boy’s mouth, and the demon Jesse is holding follows soon after. The woman’s body sags in his arms.

Claire shoves the boy off her and flips into a crouch. The kid flops limply aside, but then Jesse hears him gasp, and coughs start to shake his whole body. Ben helps him sit up. His mother jerks awake only a moment later, struggling against Jesse’s grip until he lets her go. The moment she’s free she goes to her son, and they hold each other like they're drowning. "Are you okay?" she asks, stroking his hair over and over. Jesse's throat is tight.

"You were both possessed by demons," Ben says bluntly. "There could be more of them around, so you gotta get out of here, okay? Take this road back that way and keep going 'til you're out of town."

"Thank you," the woman says, her arm tight around her son's shoulders. The boy echoes her in a low mumble. "Thank you." And they disappear into the thickening fog.

After a minute, Ben turns around. "This must mean we're getting close."

Close, yes; the pull in this direction that Jesse felt earlier has turned into a pressure that seems to come from all sides. As for the gate itself, though, he has no idea where it lies hidden behind the fog.

"Weird, huh?" Ben says to Claire. "To think we might finally find them after all this time?" When she doesn't respond, he adds, "Can't believe we've been hunting together for three years. Kind of have to wonder what we're gonna do after this."

That surprises Jesse. The way they move around each other is so familiar that he took it for granted, but he now realizes that he never heard the story of how Ben and Claire came to be hunting together. He can't imagine Claire going to someplace like the Salt Round looking for a hunting partner. Did they know, when they met, that they would click like this, or had their beginning with each other been as tense as his with then? Ben's talking like they had an agreement, a joint mission that's about to end. If he's worried—and he is, Jesse can hear it—that Claire will up and ditch him once it's over, he clearly hasn't been paying attention.

Claire offers no assurances, however. Heedless of Ben's attempt to engage her, she moves off in the direction the first demon had come from. Ben laughs halfheartedly, trying to gloss over the silence, and they follow.

The air here presses thicker around them, cold fog like demon smoke creeping into Jesse's lungs. "Can you feel that?" Claire whispers. She shakes her head, pressing her knuckles against her chest. Barely audible she adds, "Why was he here?"

"You found it?" says Ben.

Jesse looks to Claire, but she's frowning at the hollow where the fog turns completely opaque. Jesse creeps down into it, hands outstretched—not like it can kill _him_ —and his fingers meet stone.

The fog right in front of him lifts. Blank gray rock stretches as far as he can see in either direction, towers overhead, yet still gives the impression of leading _down_. There's no break in the stone, no shape of a door, but Jesse knows. This is the gate to Purgatory. "It's here."

Ben claps his hands together. "Well then," he says. "Pop 'er open."

Jesse looks around, trying to figure out who Ben's talking to.

"The gate," Ben says. "Come on, we gotta do this before the demons come back. Go for it."

Jesse's insides clench unpleasantly. "You want me to open the gate?" How can Ben possibly think, knowing what he knows, that it would be a good idea to ask the Antichrist to rip a hole in the world? Somehow his hands have yet to leave the stone. Whether it's hot or cold he can't tell; he only knows it burns.

"Well, yeah," says Ben. "That was kind of the whole point?"

"But it's full of monsters!" Jesse says, ignoring the irony. "You said, you said all those ghosts are in there, and you just want me to let them out?"

"Samuel Colt put up that barrier, remember?" Ben gestures at Claire, who isn't listening. "His spell wouldn't fail, he was too good. He knew what he was doing."

Jesse grasps for the rest of what Claire had told them in the truck. "But I thought it could only be opened every fifty years." That's how the Queen had done it, right? That's why his eighteenth birthday had gone so spectacularly wrong. Maybe if she hadn't drained so much of his power to open the gate, the backlash wouldn't have overflowed his sanity. Maybe if not for this gate Oliver would still be alive.

"I mean, yeah, that's the only time normal people can open it." Ben glances at Claire again, then back to Jesse. "But you're not normal, are you?"

"Oh, cheers, hadn't noticed that myself," Jesse snaps.

"Angels can't," Claire interjects. She's acting oddly: her eyes twitch from one spot to another every few seconds, and she keeps wiping her palms on her thighs. Jesse's never seen her look so jumpy.

"He's the freaking Antichrist, Claire," says Ben. "I'm pretty sure he has more juice."

Claire shrugs, and her gaze drifts away. Her eyebrows draw further together and a muscle in her jaw tics. Then she seems to remember them again, and says to Jesse, "Do _you_ think you can do it?"

He can do anything. Jesse says, "No," and Claire's eyes pull into full focus.

"You're lying." But it's not Claire that says it. Ben strides closer, looking between them. "Isn't he? You _can_ do it, you just _won't_."

"You're damn right I won't!" Jesse says. "I can barely keep control of my powers as it is; I'm not gonna throw them around where I might end up siccing a hellful of monster ghosts on the world. I don't want to be using them at all!"

"I know," says Ben. "I know you don't and it sucks, okay? But you can't just—" He waves his hands around. "It's like hunting, you know? You can't just know that there's evil out there, and know you've got the tools to stop it, and instead just sit around using your gun as a paperweight."

Jesse's voice gives away more hurt than he meant to. "I'm not a weapon."

"That's not what I want you to be!" Ben's impatience is turning to genuine anger. "Look," he says. "My family is trapped in there and you can get them out. I am asking you, _please_ , to make this one exception so that I can _save_ them."

Jesse's already shaking his head, like the blur will make it easier to ignore the look on Ben's face. "I can't. I can't risk it."

"It's Dean," says Ben, as if that makes it self-explanatory, as if that's enough.

But Dean is just another hunter to Jesse, one who's likely to want to kill him as badly as the Simmses did. Jesse bites his cheek but asks anyway. "Why do you care about him so much?"

"Because he's my dad," says Ben. He must catch Jesse's expression because he adds, "I don't care what that stupid demon said. Dean stuck around after my mom died and he taught me to hunt and he made me not be so scared all the time so I don't give a fuck who my _sperm donor_ was, my real dad is still Dean." His hesitation before the next sentence is so slight he might just be pausing for breath. " Seeing as you’re biologically related to the Queen of Hell, I'd think you could relate."

"Shut up!"

A fissure cracks the ground beneath Jesse's feet and he backs away, horrified. Ben wants him to use his powers _here_ , when the very earth seems determined to pull them out? He's going to get them all killed.

"I'm only here for her," he says, trying to control his voice. "I want to kill the Queen. That's all. The Winchesters are just—" Collateral damage? An unfortunate coincidence? He tries not to think the word _bait_. "I'm not here for them."

"I'm not asking you to do it for them," says Ben. "I'm asking you to do it for me."

And that should sound ridiculous—Jesse only met Ben three weeks ago. No matter how eventful those weeks turned out to be, this should be far too much to ask. But somehow it doesn't feel that way.

"I," Jesse says. Ben has saved him from devil's traps and hellhounds; he's listened to Jesse and defended him even to his own friends. But all Jesse can think about is the last time he thought he'd found someone he could trust his life to. He couldn't survive killing his only friends twice. "I _can't_."

Even Ben's anger is gone now, replaced by a confused fragility that's much harder to look at. "But...you came back."

That hits Jesse in a way he wasn't expecting. He's been thinking of Ben and Claire as the ones who let him.

"She's not here," Claire interrupts, still looking around them, everywhere, but the fog is getting thicker. "Those two demons must have been guarding something, but they haven't come back. Where's the Queen?"

Jesse turns too, and for a minute he feels so dizzy that he's sure the Queen has just appeared. But there's no one to be seen in any direction, just the trees and the fog and the cracked dry ground.

Is she still hiding? If Ben's right, here Jesse is with the power to free her two greatest enemies, standing at the very spot to do it. But the Queen hasn't arrived to stop him. What will it take to get her out in the open? To finally be able to do to her what she did to Jesse's parents?

"You know," Ben says quietly, "opening that gate would be a pretty surefire way to draw her out."

The Queen has been careful so far, and she must know Jesse aims to hurt her. None of the demons have believed Ben and Claire are his friends; none of them assume Jesse would help them. Maybe she doesn't believe he'd really do it.

Because he's not going to. Right?

"It would take so much power," Jesse mutters, thinking aloud. He remembers their earlier conversation in the truck, the push-pull he'd felt three years ago. His fingertips tingle just at the thought. There's no way he could ride out that kind of surge and stay in control.

"When this is over, we _will_ find a way to break the bond," Ben says. "If anyone can figure out how to fix you, it's Sam. Even if you turn human but the Queen escapes, they have a knife that kills demons. They can help you."

He sounds so desperate, so hopeful, that Jesse's resolve wavers in spite of himself. Ben reaches out and grabs his arm, exactly like and yet nothing like that first night in the devil's trap. Ridiculously, Jesse notices the drops of mist in Ben's eyelashes.

"I just want my family back," Ben says. "Please."

Jesse thinks of his own parents, and how even if he kills the Queen he won't ever get to see them again. Can he really resign Ben to that fate? Is he that afraid of himself?

"You don't have to."

Jesse starts. Claire steps down into the hollow with them, her usual composure finally returned.

"Claire—"

"I'm not saying he shouldn't." She stares Ben down, then looks Jesse in the eye. "But he's the one that makes this choice. Not you."

For a second Ben's grip tightens. Jesse expects another argument, another protest, more attempts to make his mind up for him. Instead Ben shrugs, and moves back, defeat already slumping his shoulders. Whatever Jesse does now, Ben's done fighting him.

It's that—that Ben is willing to walk away—that makes Jesse change his mind.

"Okay," he says quietly, and Ben's body draws up straight as hope flares back to life.

"You'll do it?"

Jesse scuffs his boot over the small crack he'd made earlier. "Yeah."

Out of nowhere, Ben swoops in and gives him a hug—flustered, all elbows, and over before Jesse registers what's happening, but bursting with so much sincerity that it leaves him warm even after Ben has let go. Ben coughs in embarrassment but doesn't stop grinning. "Uh. Thank you."

"Yeah," Jesse says again in a daze, and when he turns back to the stone wall he's not thinking about Purgatory. He gives the rocks a hard shove, but nothing happens.

"Did we really just have that whole argument about a moot point?" Claire mutters, but Jesse shakes his head.

"I got it," he says. "Just let me—"

Fire. The ground beneath him pulses with it. Jesse calls, and the snaking ribbons of burning coal send him their answer. Somewhere, too, there's a colder flame funneling down his spine and through his eyeballs. He fills and fills and fills, and when he puts his palms to the wall again, he pushes with all his strength and says, " _Open._ "

And the gate does.

He needn't have worried about his powers overflowing—the gate won't _let_ them. Hungry, like the hunter said. First, a crack splits the rock between his two hands, unnaturally straight, running up into the fog-shrouded heights. As Jesse pushes, the crack grows wider and wider. A great wind blows out from the bleak gray world within. He pushes until he can't push anymore, and then he steps back, arms trembling. The gate continues to expand.

"Dean," Ben whispers. With no more warning than that, he plunges through the gate and vanishes from sight.

Claire makes an indistinct noise and steps forward. She squeezes Jesse's shoulder with an apologetic look, but there's no doubt in her posture as she follows Ben down, weapons at the ready.

Jesse takes a deep breath. It's not just the power that has his limbs trembling. Then he, too, crosses into Purgatory.

 

* * *

 

_shoved into gray silence the fog follows you strips the fire from you you've carried it a long way (no further) this flat land of smooth stone and windless water wretched slipping sideways under the still surface was there ever anywhere else? fog-dampened you're half scorch and half nothing searching for solid ground but you are hunted even here, solid shape shadowing you outlined too sharply all clean muscle and bone he is coiled beautiful he knows what you are. run._

_you flee but fog drags your skin slow the silence dulls your heartbeat less fleet-footed now you reach the river, black unmoving slice across your path it asks you why you're running_

_you have never stopped running. now you do._

_hunters hurt but water washes clean, don't you want to make your halves whole you unholy thing you are so thirsty. the river offers no reflection for you left your face behind,_

_see how easy forgetting is? slake yourself unmake yourself and quench that wicked fire out, you will find no other end but this_

_and you kneel down by the river_

_your hunter drags you back._

_attacking fist-flurry of a body forgotten it's clawless draws out your own foreign ferocity you are not so different after all his hands on your throat and your eyes on his snarling mouth. you fight but for how long, folly to hope this hollow hunt would not follow you forever_

_the leaden monstrousness of you fills your limbs and you crawl back to the river's whispered promises, just one swallow you promise you'll stay under_

_another hand on your shoulder, and then bright—bright—_

_scalding the blood of you but your marrow burns too deep it bites back—_

_She holds on._

_You remember there is somewhere else. You remember you were looking for something other than that black river._

_She takes your hunter to hand and he shudders the bloodlust away. The silence of this place holds fast but you marvel at the apology his face speaks for him as he touches the fading bruise on your cheek; even the river couldn't forget this one._

_(but you—)_

_Another burst of brightness and she pulls you back again, pulls both of you away from that intoxicating shore. Her hand in yours brings burning clarity and you gladly bend your will to hers. Each step feels heavier than the last but she demands it of you so you move. Together through the unchanging fog and deafening silence, you three walk._

_Time, you suppose, passes._

_You are very thirsty._

_But your hunter is not so dead-limbed, and hunt he must: whatever draws him now he leads you both toward it, quickened steps lifting the haze. In the distance you see a gleam. He lets go and you are upon it: polished steel and glass, made for motion, the only thing here that reflects her light. Two others inside, trapped and wrapped up in each other, unmoving. He opens the door to their metal coffin, he's shaking their bodies, but his voice is lost and they don't wake up._

_He turns his pleading to you—why? What good are you when you have no good to give? Her hand leaves yours and pushes you forward. Their belief baffles you._

_Into the car you get, then, and watch the two sleepers breathe; you can't pull this place from their lungs after breaths so deep. Their stillness overwhelms you._

_But they were not forgotten. Something of them has stayed intact. Beneath your palms the car calls out, reminds you of blurring wheels, open roads, speeding so far and so fast that even this fog couldn't paralyze you, and your hands remember parting stone. Your greatest talent has always been the escape._

_The sound of the engine purring to life is lost in the mist. But you feel it._

_Quick, quick, before all your sparks go out. It's he who holds the wheel as on your other side she brings her brightness to bear. Your hands held tight to your collective rumbling heartbeat, you push on with a force you thought you'd forgotten. Slowly over the slippery surface the wheels turn._

_The landscape looks as endless as ever but safe inside the steel you sense the tear you left to come through, the way that is not yet shut. You are so close now and you almost imagine you can see sunlight—_

_But there, between you, the river. The shuddering engine falls dead._

_(it knows it knows it sees you are one to keep my dear so much better to sleep my dear drink up drink up we are waiting for your weary head)_

_Light flares and she turns your face so you see nothing but hers and behind her eyes' shining lies something like the color blue. You tremble back to life and after moments so does the car beneath you._

_No way out but through. You have to cross the river._

_You drive yourself to the shoreline, the water so still it seems solid, lying treacherous in wait. But you, half-crucified creature of deserts, you have walked on water before._

_The car rumbles defiance. You push until wheels meet water, and oh_

_how the river rises up a roiling rage of teeth and tongues the thick slop slithers up the sides rattles every inch of your refuge but if you won't sleep my dear we will have to use our teeth my dear and all the better to eat you with oh your fear is sweet won't you come nearer_

_and the steel buckles but it holds. You hold._

_Their fangs scrape the glass so you speed up; that vicious vile viscosity swells to swallow every window so you drive blind but you drive. This tumultuous crossing is at heart a hunt like any other; steady hands on the wheel swerve you past those spiny smiles and their black emptiness devours any light that lingers too long but not hers. The car plunges onward, your miracle bolstered by his faith and her grace you couldn't do this alone but now you are fearless, fearless._

_The whispers turn to screeches in your mind but they have realized too late that you will not be sunk. Dripping, victorious, shedding toothy ichor as you go, your wheels touch down on the opposite shore and you peel away._

_Behind you the river slithers back to stillness, smooth as glass once again._

_Giddy with freedom you feel nearly flight-worthy. Above you the sky is still cracked open and for the first time you hear the faintest hint of the wind, the world. The car leaps forward, triumphant; with your friends at your side you burst back out of the gate and_

* * *

The car is going so fast that they're through the fence, over one hill and halfway up another before Jesse can even pull his hands off the dashboard. Ben slams on the brakes from the driver's seat, but by the time they've screeched to a halt, the car has cleared the second slope and rolled down into a grove of sickly aspens. After Purgatory's oppressive silence, the rumble of the engine is deafening.

Jesse lets his arms drop and a leaden weariness washes through all his limbs. He can no longer feel his powers at all and has a moment of mad hope that Purgatory ate them up, that he will never be asked to do something like this again. He leans to rest his head against the dashboard and breathes.

After a long beat, Claire says, "If either of you ever loses yourself like that again, I'm killing you both."

Ben laughs, a little unsteady, but Jesse can only shiver. What would have happened to them if Claire hadn't been there to pull him away from the river?

"That wasn't really me," Ben says to Jesse, and Jesse remembers the feral swiftness of Ben's body when he attacked. "I mean, I guess it sort of was but I didn't mean it. You get that, right? I'm not like—I don't actually want to hunt you."

Not like Oliver, he means, and Jesse has to wonder whether Ben's instinctive reaction to being near a cambion will be too strong for him to fully bury even out here. But the bruise on Jesse's face is long since healed, and for now they're safe and together, so he says, "I know."

That question settled, all Ben's attention focuses on the two men still sleeping in the backseat. Jesse turns to look at their rescued prize. The long-haired one, Sam, the one who told Jesse the truth, has his shaggy head tucked down into the crook of Dean's shoulder even though Sam is taller than Dean. Something about the way Dean's arm is curled around Sam's shoulders reminds Jesse of Ben.

"Dean?" Ben says. Neither of the Winchesters move. He reaches over the seat and jiggles Dean's leg. "Dean."

Jesse doesn't want to say anything, but he wonders if they _can_ be woken up. Purgatory had him ready to lay down and give up within minutes; if the Winchesters have been locked inside for three years, who knows how much of them is even left? In Centralia's weak overcast sunlight, they look almost insubstantial.

Ben crawls bodily into the back of the car—jostling all four of them as he goes—and tries to pull Sam upright. Sam, it transpires, is _heavy_.

"Come on, man," says Ben, his voice getting higher, as Sam flops limply back against the seat. "All that trouble and you guys are gonna sleep through the dramatic reunion? That's weak." His voice cracks on the last word and Jesse sees him swallow. The Winchesters aren't moving.

"Let Claire try," he says suddenly. They both turn to look at him, Claire with both eyebrows raised. Jesse shrinks back into the leather seat. "Just—you woke us up, in there, I mean you kept us sane, so maybe your—you, maybe you can counteract it. Or something." He flaps his hands at Claire's midsection. Her eyes aren't glowing anymore, but he can still feel her; maybe the Winchesters will too.

Claire looks skeptical, but Ben turns to her with pleading written in every line of his body. "Can you?"

"No promises," she warns, but scoots a little higher and leans over the seat. She bites her lip, grabs Sam's hand, and tugs.

Eyes still closed, Sam's brows contract.

"Look! He moved, he moved!" Ben grabs Sam by both shoulders and shakes him hard enough to make his neck wobble. "Sam? Sam!"

Claire sits back and stares at her hands, expression unreadable, but Jesse thinks maybe he knows how she feels: it's never comfortable wondering what other signs and wonders you might be capable of. If the angel gave these powers to her, she's probably as unhappy with them as Jesse.

Meanwhile, though, Sam's muscles are twitching, and with a low groan his eyes open. He blinks at them all in befuddlement. "Wh—" Then he notices his brother, still unconscious beside him. "Dean."

He says it the same way Ben had, scared and determined both, unwilling to accept anything that isn't Dean awake and alive. The way that means _family_.

"Dean," Sam says again, firmer now, like a command. He takes Dean's chin in one hand and presses the other against Dean's chest. "Dean, wake up."

Claire opens her mouth, perhaps to suggest that she would have more luck—but before she can say anything at all, Dean gasps awake like a man saved from drowning.

"Dean?" say Ben and Sam in unison, but it's Sam that Dean's unfocused eyes fix on.

"Sammy?"

"Hey," says Sam, smiling so wide he looks a whole decade younger. Dean lurches forward in a way Jesse doesn't quite understand, then stops when he registers the rest of them.

"All right," he says, "who the hell are all of you, and what are you doing in my car?"

Jesse and Claire exchange a look.

"Dean, it's me," says Ben, squashed in awkwardly on Sam's other side.

Dean squints. "Ben?" Ben nods eagerly, and Dean grins. "Man, look at you. Went and got grown up while I wasn't looking." He reaches over Sam and ruffles Ben's hair, and Jesse gets it now, why Ben counts Dean as a father worth braving Purgatory for. Ben beams.

But that must remind Dean of something, because he straightens and seems to take in their surroundings for the first time. He climbs out of the car. The rest of them follow, frown returning to Sam's forehead as he takes in the low cloud cover, the faint heat from the ground below them. Jesse stops watching Ben watch Dean and looks around himself. This little valley they landed in hides the town from sight, and the gate as well, though their tire tracks point the way back. Beyond that hill he hears something odd, a clattering rushing sort of noise he can't place.

"Ben," says Dean, "where are we?"

The noise is getting louder. Jesse goes to investigate, tottering on shaky legs—he doesn't belong here intruding on their family reunion anyway. He reaches the top of the hill, and stops dead.

"Claire," he says. She comes to stand by him, and her folded arms drop.

"Shit."

Below them, spilling gray and bodiless across the landscape, a nightmare across a floodplain: monsters.


	7. Chapter 7

Jesse can't breathe. There are things down there of every sort Elias taught him to recognize and things he doesn't even know the names for. Purgatory has shaken them loose from their human disguises, the wrongness of them on full display: a shifter's gooey skin sloshes around its body like an overlarge coat; a werewolf lopes on all fours with a full-furred snout; the round gaping hole of a changeling's mouth suckles the free air as its child's body shambles closer.

Fuck. _Fuck._ This is why he never uses his powers, why he taught himself to lock down every flicker that tries to spill out of him. His powers have been more active in the last three weeks than the entire three years prior, sometimes even on purpose, and he should've known he was courting trouble by letting them out because _this_ is where it leads: an open wound in the world bleeding the dead (a tornado of fire in the desert)—when Jesse makes mistakes, people die.

Sam comes up behind them, then Dean, Ben following after. For a moment all five of them do nothing but stare.

"What the hell did you do?" Dean whispers.

"But—the barrier," Ben sputters, as the malformed ghosts creep closer. "Samuel Colt made it so they couldn't come out, I thought it would hold!"

"That barrier went down years ago!" snaps Dean. "We gotta stop any more monsters from coming out _right_ now, or there will be hell to pay and I mean that literally."

Ben looks younger than Jesse's ever seen him. "I was just—"

"We are _not_ doing this again." Dean sticks a finger in Ben's face. "I go somewhere, no matter how bad, you better leave me there, understand?" He scrubs one hand down over his face. "How did you even do this? That gate wasn't supposed to open for another fifty years." Something strikes Dean then, and his expression turns, if possible, even more foreboding. "Ben. Tell me you did not make a deal."

"He didn't do anything."

Jesse is as surprised to hear his own voice as everyone else. Most of him is screaming at his mouth to _shut up, what are you doing, those are hunters and this is your fault and you just grabbed their attention_ —but Ben looks like he might be about to cry, so Jesse clears his throat and says it a little louder. "Ben didn't do anything. I was the one who—who opened the gate."

Dean looks from Ben to Jesse to Ben again, then steps forward and gives Jesse a tight smile that fools exactly no one. "Dean Winchester," he says, and sticks out his hand. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

His voice makes very clear what he plans to do if Jesse tries to run. Trapped, knowing it's a bad idea but unable to think of another option, Jesse gingerly reaches out to shake Dean's hand.

The second their skin touches, images start flashing across Jesse's mind. A girl's corpse, skull scratched to the bone. _So we're in a blast zone of crazy—_ A ham, charred to a cinder. _Everything Jesse believes comes true._ A eleven-year-old, unimpressed, saying _what, you guys don't knock?_ A knife, serrated and etched with symbols. _This creature is half demon and half human, but far more powerful than either. He's just a kid!_ The black-eyed thing inside his birth mother slamming Sam against the wall. _Exactly like the X-Men._ A plastic toy turned back into a man who says, _he's gone_.

Dean jerks back like he's been shocked. "What the hell was that?"

Jesse stares at his hand in horror. He knows what that was: Dean's memories of him, the ones he'd erased when he ran to Australia, somehow restored. Is this all it takes to expose him again? One touch?

"Sam, you remember this kid?" Dean says, circling Jesse. "Jesse Turner? Half demon, supposed to smite the world." Jesse tries to turn without looking like he's doing it, watching Dean's hands. Ben doesn't say anything; why would he? Dean's right.

"Half demon?" Sam brushes his hair out of his eyes and looms closer to Jesse, but no flash of recognition comes. "I'm pretty sure I'd remember that." Jesse tucks his hands into his sweater pockets.

"I'm pretty sure I would have, too," says Dean, deadly quiet. "This your plan, then? Wait till we were out of the way, then bring back _Lucifer_?"

"What?" Jesse croaks, thrown and shaking badly. "The _devil_? I only wanted—"

"Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about." Dean stalks closer. "That gate is the last seal holding the Cage shut, and as soon as ten thousand monsters make it through, it's gonna break. Well, I'm not letting that happen, understand?"

"Cage?" Ben interrupts. "What Cage, what seals—" but Claire's head has jerked up as though on a string. "Claire?"

She stalks right up to Sam and Dean. "This is the _last one_? What did you _do_?"

Ben throws up his hands. "What are you _talking_ about?"

Claire wheels around. "You know the devil is locked in a cage in Hell."

That's news to Jesse, but Ben nods. "Yeah, and?"

"The Cage has seals, like locks," Claire says. "That's how the apocalypse started. Some of them got broken, and he got out."

Just a few months before he left home, Jesse had nightmares of searing pain and blinding white light, a hundred thousand times worse than Castiel. It woke up something inside him he's been trying to tamp down ever since. Now he's managed to bring back something even worse than that far-off horde of monster ghosts—but can he even be surprised that Lucifer is what comes of using his powers? He's the _antichrist_.

"But Sam put him back," Ben protests, and Jesse finds himself eyeing Sam—whatever putting the devil back entails, he really really hopes Sam can do it twice.

"Not forever," Claire says. "If _every_ seal breaks, the Cage will open again, and Sam couldn't put him back even if he wanted to." Jesse’s faint hope goes down in flames. "There'd be nowhere for him to go."

"Jesus," Ben swears, looking out at the current of monsters with fresh horror. "And I—I—"

"No," Dean says, eyes on Jesse. "Not _you_."

 _Jump_ , Jesse thinks, _jump jump jump go anywhere just go_ , but his powers feel like they're covered in soggy cotton, he gave too much—

"Don't touch him."

Claire steps in front of Jesse, brazen and unshakeable, and Jesse has never been so pathetically grateful to anyone in his entire life.

Dean's hostility wavers at her absolute indifference to it. "Who are you again?"

"The first seal would never have broken if the Righteous Man hadn't," Claire says. "Jesse opened the gate to save _your_ sorry skins. If that put the Cage in jeopardy, whose fault is that?"

Ben doesn't move toward either Dean or Jesse, but he bites his lip unhappily and then firms his jaw. "Jesse didn't want to open the gate. He only did it 'cause I asked him to."

Most of Jesse clings to the lifeline—maybe it can save him from Dean, if not from his own guilt—but a horrifyingly vocal part wants to protest again, just to protect Ben from Dean's disappointment. Dean shifts his posture from predator to frustrated parent. "Ben, didn't I teach you anything?"

But Sam cuts in, suddenly holding a pistol. "Everyone back to the car."

Jesse follows the direction of Sam's gaze and then he sees why—a pale stand of monster ghosts have reached the outskirts of their little clearing, and all those translucent eyes are fixed on the humans. Dean brings his gun out too, but they're ghosts; even Jesse knows that won't be enough.

"You got a weapon?" Dean asks Ben quietly.

"In the car," Ben whispers. "Claire?"

She shakes her head. "I dropped them in Purgatory," she says. "I had to carry you." It's unclear whether she means Ben, Jesse, or both of them, but Jesse twinges with guilt anyway: if he hadn't lost his head the minute they got down there...

"Perfect," Dean spits. "Just—peachy." He runs a hand through his hair in the same way Ben does. "Sammy? Bright ideas?"

No one asks Jesse if he has any weapons. He pulls his old hunting knife from where, miraculously, it has remained on his belt this whole time. It looks tiny and ridiculous against the wall of ghosts surrounding them.

"There's an arsenal in the trunk, if we can get to it," Sam mutters.

"Running like hell it is, then," says Dean. "On three. One—two—"

It's what the monsters were waiting for. Over the dry grass they come rushing, some on two feet, some on four, some taking flight and diving from above. Jesse didn't think he'd walked very far, but it seems an impossible distance now with his limbs still half-numb and the flickers in his vision drawing closer on every side.

They almost make it.

Something big swoops overhead, sending a foul wind across Jesse's scalp. "Ben, _drop_!" yells Dean, and Ben hits the ground immediately. The shadowy thing screeches and pulls up, disappearing back into the clouds, but while all their attentions are on the sky an earthbound creature in the shape of a mountain lion seizes its opportunity. Ben sees it coming and tries to dodge out of its path, but his breath got knocked out when he landed and Jesse knows with terrible certainty that Ben isn't going to get out of the way fast enough. The thing leaps, claws out, and Jesse runs toward Ben but all he has is one little knife—

Claire gets there first. With no weapon but her body she throws herself between Ben and his attacker; instead of Ben's neck, those wicked sharp claws slice deep gouges across the meat of Claire's legs.

She gives a frightened little gasp drops to her knees. Dean fires. Turns out those guns are good for something after all, because whatever scatters out of that bullet—salt?—blows the ghost into wisps and it doesn't reappear.

"Claire!" Jesse yells, running towards them. Ben is helping her sit up, but Claire seems not to even notice his hands on her and that's when Jesse knows something is really wrong.

"They're broken," she says in a horrible sort of wail, ripping apart the bloodied mess of her jeans, panicked like he's never seen her. "They're broken, oh God, give me your knife, quick, give me your knife—"

Meanwhile the Winchesters have blasted a path to the car and opened the trunk. "Ben, heads up!" yells Dean, tossing a gun toward them between scattering monster ghosts.

"I'm busy!" Ben yells back, catching the gun with barely a glance and immediately dropping it aside. "Claire, calm down, come on—" He strips off his outer flannel and presses it against the gashes in her leg, but Claire shoves his hand away. Before the blood wells out anew Jesse sees that the skin of her thigh is interrupted by strange white markings, letters in a language he doesn't know, sentences scored through by those gaping clawmarks. At first he thinks they're some sort of tattoo—they're clearly deliberate—but then he notices how the blood runs up against them, traces their raised outlines. They're scars.

"For protection," Claire says, and she's clearly trying to look unfazed by Jesse's scrutiny but she's breathing too heavily to manage it. "I need them. Now _give me your knife_."

Jesse almost gives it to her just because of the sheer force in the command, but the inevitable conclusion catches up with him: occult symbols that a civilian couldn't be trusted to write accurately. Claire's reluctance to be touched by anyone, even Ben. The blatant need in her face now. "Did you do those _yourself_?"

Ben's head snaps up at that, and he gives Jesse a look of _don't go there mate_ , but the words are already out.

"And now they're broken," Claire says, and she actually stands up to face him, swaying slightly and ash-pale but still mildly terrifying. Over Ben's protests she says, emphasizing every word, "I need to put them back."

Jesse tries to imagine her carving into herself around those slices and feels queasy. That's something the Simmses would have done to him, and she wants to do it to herself? His arm twitches, moving the knife out of her reach.

" _Jesse_ ," she says, but the rest is cut off by the sound of fluttering wings. What little blood remained in her face drains away.

A blast of light engulfs the entire clearing. It burns, it _burns_ , that electric heat that's so much stronger than Claire's, the antithesis of everything he is. The monstrous ghosts from Purgatory vaporize on contact with it, and Jesse screams but he can't even hear himself—

And then it's over. Hands help Jesse up again, Ben's hands, because Claire hasn't moved a muscle. A dark-haired man in a trenchcoat has just appeared in their midst and Jesse recognizes this angel: it's the same one that tried to kill him when he was eleven years old.

But Castiel isn't looking at Jesse. He's not even looking at Claire. Instead his eyes are fixed on the two brothers that are staring back at him in wonder.

"Dean," says Castiel. "Sam."

"Cas," Sam says, with a watery sort of smile. "Good to see you, man." Dean doesn't say anything at all, just takes a step forward and stops.

Any second now one of them is going to start running toward the other, and the field will burst into bloom while sunlight shines down on them all and music plays—but in that moment of mutual hesitation, Claire picks up Ben's gun and shoots Castiel in the back.

"Hey!" yells Dean. Castiel turns his head in Claire's direction but otherwise gives no indication that he noticed the bullet.

"Claire," he says, a little cooler than he'd greeted the Winchesters. Then he notices her bleeding legs. "You're hurt."

Claire takes a few unsteady steps forward and shoots him again.

"Okay, that stops right now," Dean says, striding toward them with his own gun pointed at Claire, but Ben says "stop, stop, it's fine," and blocks Dean’s path. Claire ignores both of them. When she tries to fire again, the gun does nothing—out of ammo—and she throws it aside.

"Give him back," she says to Castiel, voice raw like she's been screaming for years. "You son of a bitch. Give him _back_."

Jesse thinks of that early morning when Claire had said, _if my father's soul is still trapped in that body, I want you to let him go_. Instinctive fear of that searing angelic energy wars with his need to make Claire stop shaking like that. She hadn't asked for a promise, but he's already broken the world to save Ben's dad; what will she think of him if he doesn't rescue hers?

But Castiel shakes his head. "I have been the only occupant of this vessel since it was destroyed by Raphael. Your father is gone."

Claire clenches her jaw, and blinks rapidly at the ground. Then she throws herself forward and punches Castiel square in the mouth.

"Claire!" says Ben, as she staggers back on wounded legs, cradling her hand. Castiel moves forward as if to steady her.

"Don't _touch_ me," Claire spits, backing away even more. Her face is a mess of anger and hatred and hurt.

Castiel lets his hand drop. "I don't want to fight you, Claire."

"I don't care!" If she hadn't already injured three of her limbs, Jesse is willing to bet she would punch him again.

"You're hurt," says Castiel, as Ben grabs Claire's arm and whispers rapid-fire in her ear— _bigger problems right now_ and _not worth it_. Castiel pays him no more heed than Claire does. "I promised your father to protect you. You need healing."

"I don't need _anyone_ ," Claire hisses, shaking Ben off. "Especially not _you_."

A howl from the trees interrupts Claire's response—though from the way she's clenching her fists that's probably for the best. Around their little hollow, monsters are beginning to congregate again, drawn by fresh human blood.

Castiel looks down at Claire and sighs. "Enough of this," he says. "Our first priority is to close the gate to Purgatory. It's imperative that we stop any more souls from escaping."

Dean slaps the car roof. "Well, Sam," he says, "I'll rock paper scissors you for it."

"Dean, no," says Sam immediately. "We went over this, remember? I'm not leaving you, and you're not leaving me. If we're going to Purgatory, we're going together."

" _Neither_ of you is going back into Purgatory," says Castiel, some emotion entering his face for the first time. "Ever." He glares at Jesse. "The cambion will undo what he did. In fact, I'm confused why this has not already happened."

Dean mutters something and shoots a ghost that ventured too close. Everyone else stares at Jesse.

"I'm—I'm tapped out," he stutters. "Opening it, and then getting us all back out—the fog doesn't like me very much so I—I don't have enough power."

"The gate also accepts sacrifices," says Castiel, and Jesse flinches. Castiel nods, seeing he understood. "I'll be back." To Sam and Dean: "Do _not_ re-enter Purgatory." And he vanishes.

Claire exhales sharply, and the pure willpower that was holding her up wavers. This time it's Jesse who catches her before she falls.

"Shit." Ben hurries to untie the flannel around his waist. "Look, you _need_ to bandage these up, okay? You can—fix them—later."

"I'm going to kill him," Claire says. "I'm going to kill him." But she lets Ben tie his carefully-folded shirt tightly around one leg, and struggles out of her own overshirt for the other.

Without an angel to hold them at bay, the monsters grow bold again, and most of them seem focused on Claire. Ben takes aim at a chupacabra skulking nearby and blows it away. "Help me get Claire into the car," he says to Jesse.

The Winchesters are standing back to back in front of their car's arsenal, shooting everything that moves, but it's not going to hold the ghosts off forever. If they get killed because Jesse is too slow, what then? If Ben—or Claire—

No. Castiel was right: if Jesse can't command the gate to close, he can still give it what it wants. He helps Claire into the backseat, her face tight with pain, and then takes a step back. "I'm going to the gate."

"I thought you said you didn't have enough—" Then Ben realizes what Jesse means. "No. Jesse, no."

"It's the only plan we got," Jesse says. He tries to smile. "Come on, mate, you just got your dad back. You should be happy. This way I won't—" He has to stop, and clear his throat. "I won't get in your way."

"Don't you dare."

Jesse looks down at Claire, wiping his eyes on one shoulder surreptitiously. "What?"

She stares straight ahead, unblinking. "Don't you dare act like this is for Ben, or me, or any of us. If you're going to fucking kill yourself, Jesse Turner, it's because of _you_. And you better not expect me to forgive you." Her mouth trembles a little on that last part but she doesn't look at him.

Jesse can't even think for the unfairness of it all. He is doing it for them, he's only even in this mess for them, and for the antichrist to say the world would be better off without him is just objective fact. "What do you want me to do?" he manages finally. "Let everyone die?"

"You need more power?" she returns. "Then find the Queen and _take_ some."

"Take—" The idea sounds preposterous. Jesse's been focusing so hard on how to give his powers up that it hadn't even occurred to him to try and siphon hers. But then, isn't that exactly what he'd done, however unintentionally, in the shack? Like Ben said, the bond goes both ways. He just has to be strong enough to use it against her.

He thinks of his parents and bares his teeth. He won't mind seeing the Queen sucked dry for a change. He looks _forward_ to it. "The gate." Jesse says. "That's where she'll be."

And if she's not there?

Well. Then he's still got another way to close Purgatory.

Ben finishes his rapid-volley shots against a pack of skinwalkers. "Well, you're not going alone," he says. "Dean!"

Dean cackles, swinging a fire poker like a sword. "God, I missed this," he says. "What's up?"

"We need to get back to the gate! Can the Impala get us there?"

"Kid, she'll getcha anywhere you need to go!"

He and Sam swing in tandem, slicing apart something pale and much larger than Jesse is comfortable with. Then as one they slam the trunk shut.

"Finally decided to man up, huh?" says Dean to Jesse in passing. To Ben he adds, "She gonna be okay back there?"

"I'm fine," says Claire, though Jesse sees she's slumped down so only the seat back is keeping her head up. Her breath, too, is coming shallower. Ben climbs in next to her, looking worried, and after a minute Jesse follows suit.

"First she shoots Cas and now she's bleeding all over my upholstery. But hey, what better way to meet the in-laws?" Dean says to himself, full of manic energy, drumming on the steering wheel. Sam slides in next to him and slams the door. "Buckle up, kids," says Dean, and guns it before anyone has the chance to point out that there are no seatbelts in this car.

Even without Jesse's help, the car is fast; warded, too, if the way ghosts can't seem to damage it is any indication. Claire's harsh breath comes loud enough to be heard over the engine. When her eyes fall closed, Jesse maybe panics a little bit. "Claire?"

"M'okay," she slurs, blinking awake again. "Hurt worse before." Jesse thinks of the scars under those makeshift bandages and wonders what 'before' she's talking about. Over her limp head Ben gives Jesse a worried look. At least they can be glad she's stopped asking for a knife.

The car pulls onto that last spit of road before the field where the gate lies open. Dean cuts the engine and turns around to look at Jesse. "Your show now."

"Right behind you," Ben mutters in his ear. Jesse firms his jaw and steps out of the car.

The gate is...bad. Monsters continue crawling endlessly out in a hungry swarm, but now Jesse can see that the gate itself is still opening, growing wider and wider like a mouth that wants to swallow him whole.

Monsters descend on them almost immediately, glassy-eyed from Purgatory's numbing power but awake enough to remember what hunger is, and prey. For every one that the Winchesters blast apart, another two are ready to lunge forward. Jesse doesn't even have time to look for the Queen, ducking and weaving through the ghostly horde and slashing blindly with a knife that wouldn't do any good even if it struck its targets. "We need a better way to hold them off," Sam shouts from behind the car, heaving a bag of rock salt from the trunk. From the backseat, Claire says something.

"What?" says Ben, leaning back into the car to hear her better. A banshee sees his unprotected back and moves in, claws outstretched, and Jesse knifes it. The banshee screeches more in offense than injury, but seems to sense instinctively that he's not someone to trifle with, because it vanishes back into the crowd soon after.

"Fire," Claire is saying, over and over. "Fire. They need fire, remember?" She tries to sit up and falls back almost immediately, gasping. The cloth around her legs is completely sodden with blood.

"Dean, Sam, try torching 'em!" Ben calls over his shoulder. Sam yells an affirmative and starts pulling jugs of something out of the car. In a lower voice Ben says, "Jesse? Got any fire?"

He does, he _knows_ he does, that's all he is, but Jesse just shakes his head helplessly. Chills shudder through his entire body. He's _freezing_.

"Jesse!" comes a voice, bright and welcoming. He feels a rush of nausea and turns to see—

"Emily?" says Ben. "What are you doing here?"

It's the woman from the hunter's bar, the witch, the one who went missing—except Jesse knows, with a sick lurch, that he's not talking to that woman at all. He never has.

She blinks and her eyes turn yellow. "Pretty rude of you in Colorado, Jesse. Not recognizing your own family."

His _family_. As though she wasn't the one to cut their throats and trap him with their blood. She'd been standing right next to him in that bar—God, she'd _touched_ him—and Jesse hadn't understood. He remembers her voice in his ear, making him seasick, whispering _the fire always wins_. How could he have been so clueless?

"It was your idea," Jesse says numbly. "You told us to come here."

The Queen of Hell smiles. "Wasn't hard, once I figured out you were running around with that one." She waves at Ben, who's pulled out his gun but looks unsure what to do with it. Jesse steps forward, blocking him from her view. "Somehow I didn't think you'd take the advice if it was coming from me."

"Dean, don't!" Ben exclaims, and that gives the Queen enough warning to eel away from the serrated knife in Dean's hand.

"Dean," she says, grabbing his arm and twisting. "Wish I could say I was happy to see you, but, well."

"Meg," Dean growls. The Queen of Hell has a name? A spirit rushes by nearly on top of them and Dean uses the distraction to break free, knife held out again. "Haven't we already done this dance?"

"Do _not_ stab Emily!" Ben yells, grappling with the ghost of a vampire. "Fucking hell, Katie is going to kill me."

"Ah, Katie," says the Queen—Meg? "She's been an unexpected bonus. Who knew she was such a romantic?"

"What did you do to her?" Ben says furiously. The vampire lunges at him, and Ben shoots it in the stomach.

"Oh, not half of what I could," Meg replies. "But I've got business to attend to." So saying, she knees Dean in the balls.

Dean drops. Meg turns back to Jesse, and he tries to steel himself against the fresh wave of sickness that comes of having her so close to him; he's not letting his weakness get the better of him this time. Before Meg can do or say anything to him, however, Jesse's hit with a different flavor of pain and hears wingbeats. The clearing seems suddenly brighter, less foggy.

“Clarence,” Meg says to someone over his shoulder. “I should’ve known you'd follow Dean here.”

"Cas," Dean groans from the ground. "Where the hell did you go?"  
  
"I believe you would call this the nuclear option," says Castiel, staring Meg down. “I brought the weapons.” The next instant there’s a jarring clang that came, Jesse realizes, from the sound of their swords hitting each other. Castiel drops back into a fighter's stance, for the first time looking as dangerous in his human form as Jesse knows him to be beneath. "Not running this time?" he growls.   
  
“I’m not afraid of you.” Meg spins the silvery blade, circling him. "You won’t use Heaven’s nukes with Sam and Dean here. You're not capable of sacrificing them. I've already won."

Castiel springs forward, sword a blur, but Meg blocks him. Adder-quick she scores a line across his ribs that bleeds light. Another blow, and she's disabled his sword arm. Castiel's presence is a tangible thing now, an oppressive expanding force that scalds Jesse without even trying. They clash again, and Jesse can't think about the gate, or his parents, or anything at all except getting away from that awful light.

Something bowls him over before he can get far. He hears gunshots, but has no idea if they're meant to aid him; a fox-tailed ghost digs its teeth into the meat of his shoulder and rips the skin clean off. Its body feels like icewater but it's just solid enough that he can push it off, roll away and then watch with growing dread as his shoulder fails to heal.

Another blast of light engulfs the clearing, but this time when the pain recedes Jesse sees that the ghosts are still there, and Castiel nowhere to be found. Meg spits on the ground. Did she kill him?

"I like her," Meg declares, looking at the car. Jesse sees one of the windows covered with bloody runes from the inside, and from this distance he can just make out Claire's hand slipping down the glass.

But he doesn't have time to worry about what she did or whether she's even still alive in there; if he doesn't close the gate soon, they'll all be dead. He clutches his shoulder and heads toward the gate again, not even really thinking about what he's going to do when he gets there, but Meg's attention will turn back to him any second and if he's not strong enough to withstand her then he needs to remove himself from the equation before it's too late.

But he's bleeding now. Nearly human. And the monsters crawling out of Purgatory smell his weakness. He's within ten meters of the gate when the ghost of a black dog appears in front of him. Jesse dodges, and another dog stops him. He turns and turns but there's no safe path; the pack has him surrounded.

His grip tightens on his useless knife. Fine. He only has to be alive enough to crawl through the gate when they're done with him, and nothing on this earth has managed to kill him yet.

Then the lead dog yips, and one by one the pack bursts into clouds of black ash.

A cold hand clamps down on Jesse's neck. "Kid, we've got to do something about your martyr complex."

Jesse whirls, knife outstretched, but Meg catches his hand before the blade connects.

"Ah tut tut," she says. "This meatsuit is a friend of Ben's. You don't really want to make Ben mad, do you?"

Ben. Jesse looks past Meg, surprised to see how far away the car seems now. Ben stands guard over the bloody window with Claire's handprint on it, gun exchanged for a fire poker, swatting aside anything that comes too close. There's no sign of Claire inside. A little closer to the gate, Sam and Dean appear to have jury-rigged themselves a flamethrower. But it only fires every fourth time they aim, and they're arguing about it, neither of them paying attention to what's happening to Jesse. Does he really expect their help?

Abruptly the back of Jesse's skull tingles, and he feels something hot push its way into him. Deeper than that something sparks back to life like a match being struck. What did she just do to him? He pulls away, but the pain he expects from his shoulder never comes. He pushes aside the torn cloth and sees unbroken skin, good as new.

"You're welcome," Meg says.

Jesse tugs his sweater back into place. Maybe she, like the Simms family, finds more joy with a clean slate. "What do you want?"

Meg smiles at him like they're both in on a secret. "You've already done what I wanted, Jesse. The real question you should be asking is what comes next."

Jesse swallows, hand on his knife. "They told me," he says. "They said you're breaking the devil out of Hell."

She gives a coy laugh and ducks her head. When she looks up, her eyes are poisonous sulfur-yellow. "Guilty as charged."

Meg isn't touching him anymore, but that power she pushed into him has rekindled his own. Ignoring every hard-earned habit, Jesse nudges the flame higher. "Why?"

"Because he is our creator," Meg answers, certainty in every line of her body. "And unlike that invisible deadbeat the angels pray to, Lucifer is real and he cares about us. He cares about _you_ , Jesse."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Jesse manages, as another wave of dizziness pounds him. He tries to focus on the sensation, where it's coming from. Is she doing this on purpose?

"Doesn't it?" She steps closer, and even with all the chaos around them, her voice is all Jesse hears. "I know who you are, Jesse, and I've seen what your life is like. Always running, always hiding your true nature, forever afraid that the people you love are going to turn on you. But when Lucifer is free?" She shakes her head, rapturous. "He will make the world anew, and that world will belong to us."

Jesse takes a deep breath. "We're not an _us_." Then he bundles up the power he's regained, feels for that connection in the back of his mind, and _punches_.

A shockwave reverberates between them. Meg twitches, eyes flickering, and then she laughs. "See? You've got some fight in you after all." She plucks the connection like a violin string and Jesse's stomach turns over. "We're more alike than you think."

"I’m nothing like you," Jesse mumbles as a tremor works its way out of his arms. If he can't hurt Emily and Meg's powers are stronger than his, how is he supposed to win?

Meg sighs. "You think you want to be human." Jesse swings a wild punch, but Meg catches his fist and holds onto it, leaning closer. "But ask yourself: if you give up your power, and repent of your sins, and everything goes exactly as you hope—do you really think they'll stop seeing you as a monster?"

Jesse looks to Ben again. Human-shaped ghosts are edging him slowly away from the refuge of the car, taunting him from just out of his fire poker's range. On the other side of the car, unnoticed by Ben, another of them is creeping toward the door where Claire lies in who knows what state. Before Jesse can shout a warning, a bloom of flame appears from Sam and Dean and the ghosts are driven away. Ben turns and sees Dean, who says something that Jesse can't hear and gives Ben a little salute. They turn back to the fight with identical grins on their faces.

"You've killed people, they know that, and Dean's not good at forgiveness," Meg says softly. "Even without the hero worship, you know he taught Ben to see in black and white."

The hopelessness that makes Jesse's shoulders sag is entirely of his own making. He saw what Ben really thought of him, when Purgatory brought his inhibitions down. She's just telling the truth; hunters are hunters.

But Ben isn't like that all the time. He defended Jesse, even against Dean. He let Jesse _out_ of a devil's trap. He'd said he liked Jesse without even knowing Jesse was listening, and Claire hadn't called him for a lie.

"You're wrong," Jesse says. Ben is not Oliver.

“Am I?” says Meg. She lets go of his hand. “Have you forgotten your eighteenth birthday?”

Jesse goes very still. The only people he’s ever told about that night are Ben and Claire. “What?”

Meg circles him. “Oliver Simms tricked you into a shack with his whole godforsaken family, because you trusted him,” she says. “They tortured you for _weeks_. And eighteen years to the day after I gave birth to you, you started to die.”

“How do you know that?” Jesse whispers. They were alone on that mountain, he’s sure of it—but only hours earlier, he’d been in the Salt Round with Emily. And she’d planted a coin in his pocket to hear every word.

But Meg is shaking her head. “How many times do I have to tell you? We’re _connected._ You’re the reason I was able to open this gate the first time; I pulled that power from you. And when I did, I saw—everything.” Her hands clench into fists. “I felt how they were hurting you. I’d taken too much, left you weak, and for that I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to let you die.” She meets his eyes again. “So I gave you back everything I had to offer.”

“No,” says Jesse, remembering how fire filled him up until he couldn’t help but burst with it. “I killed—you _made_ me—”

“They deserved it!” The ground below them rumbles, fire roiling just below the surface. “Jesse, you can’t know how proud I was when I saw what you did to them. They betrayed you and you made them _pay_ for it.” She laughs, almost manic. “And I went back, I tracked them all down, every last one of those Simms bastards, and I _dragged their souls to Hell_. They can _never_ touch you again.”

Jesse’s going to be sick. It’s not just the faces he burned that will haunt him now: an entire family tree has been wiped from existence, all because of him.

But he won’t let it happen again. He'll feed the gate the lifeblood it needs and then it won't matter what Ben and Claire think of him, will it? No one else will die for his sake. It will all be over.

Meg catches him again just as he begins to move. "Don't even think about it."

"You gonna stop me?" snaps Jesse, reckless and exhausted.

"If need be," says Meg, but her hand finds a strip of bare skin at his wrist and his powers gutter abruptly lower. "But I'd prefer not to get my nice new hands dirty."

Nausea pounds through him, stronger than ever. "Fuck you," Jesse croaks, and then closes his mouth to keep from puking.

"Jesse." Meg grips both his limp hands in one of hers. "I'm just trying to keep you safe. I can give you a life where you don't have to be scared anymore. No more hunters, no more traps. No more being lied to by the people you call family. All you have to do is walk away."

That's what he does: runs away. No monsters in the desert but him. "Why don't you just kill me?" Jesse mumbles.

Meg sighs, and her hand on his face is almost soft. "Because you're my son."

When Jesse was very young, he accidentally shattered a piece of his parents' wedding china. He was so scared of what would happen when they found out that he hid in a closet until nearly bedtime, ignoring the increasingly worried calls as they searched for him. Finally Beth Turner discovered him among her laundry, his small face puffy from crying. _I broke it I'm sorry I didn't mean to,_ Jesse sobbed, clinging to her. _Please don't give me away._

 _We will never give you away_ , she promised fiercely. _No matter how many things you break, we still love you, because you are our son_.

Jesse has left behind every family he ever had, and still sometimes he had to watch them burn. Years he's spent afraid of the curse he brings down on people by the very nature of his existence. But all this time he’s had Meg lurking in the back of his mind, using his powers for her own purposes. Suddenly he is _furious_.

Maybe Jesse’s not the problem. Maybe Meg is.

He breaks out of her grip. "You may have given birth to me," he says, and then one hand darts out to grab her by the neck. "But I am not your son." And he starts to squeeze.

At first Meg tries to speak, but the sound quickly morphs into a choking gasp. So used to pushing his own fire away, Jesse finds it surprisingly easy to pull at hers, now, and the flames feed on fierce joy to feel hers flickering lower. She tugs back, and of course she's strong, but Jesse is a cambion and when he's sure of something nothing in the universe can tell him no.

His powers fill up, up, up until his skin is burning again, but there's more left, so Jesse pulls. And then he begins to overflow.

The ground beneath them splits open. Huge fissures snake across the dry field like gates, but instead of monsters they let loose the ever-burning fire of Centralia, hidden for a while but never to those it loves. The fog contracts, heats and rises, gone heavy green like a stormcloud.

Someone is screaming at him. Isn't this familiar. Jesse pays no heed, too enamored of the fiery taste flowing into him. Here in this windless place, the air starts to spin.

A bullet hits him, and that does break his focus. He snarls, eyes seeking out the one who shot it, and his hand on Meg's neck loosens.

"I told you," she coughs. "I told you they'd turn on you. Who else can you trust but me?"

That intoxicating rush has slowed to a trickle, but now Jesse feels the slightest tug in the opposite direction. His fingers tighten again. "You killed my parents," he reminds them both, because he's not doing this for the power, he didn't start out wanting the sweet roar of fire in his veins; this is vengeance.

Meg takes a labored breath. "The Turners?" she rasps. "You should be glad they're dead. Your parents were hunters."

His grip slackens for an instant. "No they weren't."

The pity is back. "See for yourself." And then suddenly he's back in his house, back in his vision, creeping up the stairs to where his parents lie sleeping. He opens the bedroom door, watches his mother startle awake, and barely has time to notice her hand grabbing the glass on her bedside table before the sting of holy water hits him square in the face. It buys her a little time, but not nearly enough. Her exorcism is useless against him; she dies screaming it out—

Jesse wrenches himself out of the nightmare to see Meg with tears on her face. "They lied to you," she says again. "They would have trapped you the second they found out the truth, just like the Simmses did! Well, I wiped out every last Simms you left breathing and I killed the Turners and I'd do it again, I'd kill anyone who tried to hurt you, because _you are my son_ —"

Jesse chokes off the rest of her sentence. She's lying. His parents loved him; he betrayed _them_ , not the other way around. They were normal, they were happy, they were oblivious, and he left to make sure they stayed that way. No hunter could have smiled at Jesse like his mother did—like he _knows_ she did. He made sure to remember everything because no one else would. His mom and dad loved him.

"My son," whispers Meg.

But Jesse's done listening.

He grabs the well of fire he can still feel inside her and _yanks_. Her voice stops. Slowly, her body begins to topple.

The spinning clouds above them ignite.

Jesse feels _fantastic_. Why isn't he like this all the time? He burns but never need worry because when the Queen's power runs out the land itself will feed him. The cracks in the ground burrow deeper, swallowing any soul that touches them. He will never go hungry again.

And the Queen herself, oh, how she has been brought low; barely embers remain to her now. Jesse pulls and pulls, determined to gather every last spark. He pulls Meg's face closer and sees the fear in her eyes. She can't speak but he seems to hear someone anyway, a male voice in broad vowels begging _Jesse, please_. His mouth fills with fire.

_Never again._

Jesse shakes all over. He can hear his bones creaking. The power doesn't want to let him go. But it has to, he has to, he can't let himself kill anyone else—this will all be for nothing if he can't get himself under control.

The fire in the sky blows out.

The blaze of power still burns inside him, all of it, so much he can't even feel its edges, but a glass calm settles around his mind, separates it from the fire. He will not commit the same sins twice.

First things first: that body doesn't belong to her. Jesse touches Emily's mouth and draws the smoke out like snakebite venom. Emily goes completely still, wide-eyed, only the rise and fall of her chest to show she's alive. It takes all of Jesse's attention to keep ahold of Meg, now nothing more than a writhing black cloud on the ground before him. As he watches, the smoke curls itself into a shape like the woman she was when they first met. There's still a flicker there, the very heart of her not yet extinguished, and he's aware of the desire to steal that too but it's far-off, easily ignored. Instead he closes his eyes and lets this strange focus slip up his spine to that point in his throat where everything burns hottest. The thread tying him to her unspools when he calls. With one quiet command, Jesse cuts their bond.

The fire screams joy as it greets its new master, entirely his now. The Meg-cloud _shrieks_.

As Jesse staggers backward under the weight of his new power, Meg starts to run. Her outline is smoke at first, her body ash, but with every step she takes her limbs become more solid, more visibly flesh. She darts a look at him over her shoulder and there's no yellow left in her eyes at all, just dark irises surrounded by white, wide and terrified. When he took her power for himself, Jesse left Meg human, and now neither of them are what they wanted to be. He supposes that's justice.

There's no time to chase her down now—any monster coming through that gate could be the one to bring Lucifer in its wake. His whole body a ticking time bomb, Jesse throws out his hands toward the divided stone, and all the power he just sucked in comes rushing out again with one word: " _Close_."

A dead-sound tremor shakes the earth in every direction. The open pits of burning coal snap shut. A gale springs to life through the fog, this one straight and true. One by one, slowly at first but then faster and faster, the fleeing monsters are swept up in the wind flowing back into Purgatory. Ageless stone walls grate across the ground, coming together again. The gate is closing.

"Jesse!" someone is shouting across a great distance. "Jesse!"

He stays upright just long enough to see the last spirit vanish. When a second shockwave reverberates across the landscape, rock resealing as though it had never been parted, Jesse Turner has already collapsed, and feels nothing.


	8. Chapter 8

True to form, Jesse fails to die.

Instead, he wakes up to the sound of wingbeats. There are voices. He appears to be lying on dirt, but it's warm and no one is hurting him, so he keeps his eyes firmly shut even as he hears the angel say, "I returned as soon as I could. The banishing sigil was surprisingly powerful."

"But can you heal her!" That's Ben. Jesse is pleased to find he can remember details like this. He's pretty sure he knows who _her_ is, too, if he was just given a moment to think.

"I made a promise," the angel says, and then Jesse remembers: _Claire_.

He opens his eyes. When nothing catastrophic happens, he risks sitting up. Ben's dad and the tall one are a little way off, talking to a woman who is not Claire. Ben hovers outside the black car, leaning on the open door, and from this angle Jesse can just barely see the unmoving blonde figure inside. The angel—Castiel—reaches in to touch her forehead. Jesse holds his breath. Slowly, the blood on Claire's legs disappears, like water seeping back into the ground. Her eyes drift open. Then she sees Castiel.

Whatever she says, it's too quiet for Jesse to hear. From the shape of her mouth, though, it might have been _Dad_.

Castiel bows his head. "I'm glad you're all right." Then he backs away and lets Ben help Claire out of the car. Her movements lack their usual certainty, and when she's gotten to her feet she just stares at Castiel—not like she's going to punch him again, but like she doesn't have any better ideas either.

After a moment Ben puts away the blatant adoration on his face and clears his throat. "Now Jesse."

Castiel straightens. "Grace won't heal a cambion. In fact, had he not discharged so much of his power into the gate, it would be dangerous for me to be so close to him."

"Then how are we supposed to wake him up?" Ben demands.

"No need," says Claire quietly, and her eyes meet Jesse's across the field.

Jesse scrambles to his feet. Should he start running? Claire's thoughts are impossible to guess as always. Sam and Dean focus on him laser-sharp, waiting for his move, though Sam keeps rubbing soothing circles on Emily's back. Emily only stares at the ground.

Ben comes toward Jesse, walking just a little too slowly to be entirely casual. "How you feeling?"

Jesse considers this question. All body parts appear to be present. Nothing actively pains him. If he dips below the surface, though, he finds a well of molten power that runs a lot deeper than he remembers. Everything he stole from Meg—it's still here. The memory of cutting their bond feels like a fever dream, but it brings a terribly solid realization: Jesse can never give this power away. He's ruined any chance of ever becoming human, just as surely as Meg will never be Queen of Hell again.

At least now she doesn’t have the chance to hurt anyone else.

Jesse says, "I could really go for a burger right now."

Ben grins, and the tension in the air drops considerably. "Well, we'll have to see what we can do about that."

"Just like that?"

Dean gets up and comes closer, squinting at Jesse. Jesse's powers leap, eagerly reminding him just how much he has at his disposal, but he stuffs them back down. It doesn't work as well as it used to.

"He saved your life," says Claire, before Dean can speak. "Sam's too."

"Plus let loose every monster we've ever killed, nearly blew up this entire town, and let the Queen of Hell escape." Dean doesn't look away from Jesse. "I didn't kill you when you were a kid," he says, and Jesse's heart nearly stops. But then he continues with, "And I'm not gonna kill you now. But you better learn how to shut that power down, because if you ever put Ben in danger like that again?" The threat doesn't need finishing.

"Leave him alone, Dean," Sam says, as Jesse quietly debates leaving and never coming back. "Saving the world is harder than it looks."

"Even when you're the one who broke it in the first place?" Dean retorts.

Sam gives him a _look_. "Yeah," he says. "Especially then." And whatever part of their silent conversation Jesse's missing, it makes Dean grumble and back off.

"I suppose I owe you thanks," says Castiel stiffly after a few moments. As though Jesse wasn't already halfway to a panic attack, he'd forgotten the angel. His expression must convey some measure of confusion amid the bubbling fear because Castiel elaborates: "For rescuing Sam and Dean. Fifty years is a tiny fraction of my existence, but I find the perception of time through human senses to be frustratingly irrational. To wait that long for another opportunity to open the gate..." He trails off, looking toward the Winchesters. All three of them stare at each other for a very long time.

"Are you going to help Emily or not?"

Claire folds her arms and doesn't flinch when Castiel remembers her existence. Still, she lacks the single-minded rage she'd shown earlier; Jesse wonders whether the anger burnt itself out while she was nearly dying or if she's just hiding it better now.

There's a strange tone in Castiel's voice when he says to her, "My powers are not infinite." Jesse thinks, _that must be nice_. Still, after a pointed look at Claire that Jesse doesn't understand, Castiel goes to Emily and touches her forehead.

Emily blinks.

Castiel tilts his head toward an unheard voice. Then he sighs. "I will see both of you _very soon_ ," he says to the Winchesters, and disappears. For the first time Emily shows a reaction, turning toward the place he used to be.

Dean moves into her field of vision. "Hey," he says. "You okay?"

After a long moment, Emily twitches her head back and forth. No. The thought strikes Jesse that it was Emily's body he was choking, her neck that's now forming bruises. What if she _can't_ speak?

Dean looks up at Sam, then back to Emily. "Fair enough." He coughs. "You got somewhere you can go?"

Another head-shake. Then she seems to wake up a little more, and says: "Katie."

"Katie?"

"Emily is Katie's girlfriend," Ben explains. "She's probably losing her shit by now." He puts a comforting hand on Emily’s shoulder. “We’ll get you back to Colorado, okay?” 

Jesse decides that yes, now is the time to leave.  He's not about to go back to that hunter's bar, especially not after this fiasco, double especially not with Emily still looking shellshocked and Katie just as glad for an excuse to shoot him.

"Why don't we let Dean and Sam do that," Claire says. When Ben looks at her in confusion, she widens her eyes a little and flicks them toward Jesse. Emily looks at Jesse too, and her muscles visibly tighten. She doesn't want to be anywhere near him.

"Oh," Ben says. "Are y—" He looks from Jesse to Claire. "Are—" He shuts his mouth abruptly.

"What?" says Claire.

But instead Ben turns to Dean. "You know what, yeah, can you take her?" And to Emily, "That be okay by you?"

Emily's response takes a few seconds, but she nods. "I know them," she says. Her voice is hoarse. "Not because—I mean I met you before," she says to Dean. "Back when I lived in Burkittsville."

"Burkittsville?" says Sam, baffled, but Dean snaps and points at Emily, saying, "Apple girl!"

"That's me," she says, and even manages a tiny smile.

Dean rubs his chin. "Yeah, I never forget a face I was tied to a tree to be sacrificed with. We can take you home, don't worry about it. Maybe stop for some pie on the way."

"Thank you," she says, and then her expression finally crumbles and she starts quietly crying. Sam pats her back.

Ben clears his throat awkwardly. "I'll call you, then? We can meet up?"

"Yeah," Dean says, watching as Sam offers Emily a tissue and leads her back to the car. He starts to walk away himself, then seems to remember who he's talking to. "You stay out of trouble, okay?" Jesse cringes.

"I will." Ben wavers for a minute, then runs forward and grabs Dean in a hug. Dean, taken aback, rests one hand on Ben's shoulderblades, but he seems pleased. After a few seconds Ben steps away, red in the face. "I'm glad you're back."

Dean huffs, not quite a laugh. "Good to see you too, kid." He tosses his keys in the air, gives them all a little salute, and climbs in the car with his brother. Jesse breathes much easier after the engine rumbles to life and they drive off.

Not too easy, though; he still doesn't know what Ben and Claire plan to do about him. But when he stops watching the hole the black car left in the fog, he finds that Ben's not actually paying attention to him at all.

"Check that off the to-do list, huh?" Ben says to Claire. His voice is a little too loud. "Rescuing the Winchesters, just like you pictured it."

"It could have gone worse," Claire agrees. Unconsciously she picks at the wide holes in her jeans over her thighs.

"And you met Castiel," Ben says. "And nothing bad really happened, right?"

Claire looks up sharply. What on earth is Ben doing? He of all people should know how touchy Claire can be, and even Jesse—who hasn't properly interacted with humans in years—can tell that now is a worse time than most. But all Claire does is say, slowly, "I suppose."

Ben bounces on his feet a little and then shoves his hands in his pockets. "So, you know, now that that's over," he says. "Um. You know. What're you gonna do next?"

Claire narrows her eyes. "Hunt." Jesse can't help the frisson of fear that one word gives him.

"Right, yeah," Ben says, and gives a laugh like he's forgotten how to do it. "I mean of course, right? Uh." He scratches the back of his head. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, and Claire raises an eyebrow at Jesse. Jesse shrugs, equally baffled. Ben shrugs too, and in a voice that is not nonchalant at all, asks Claire, "With...me?"

Claire's hands drop away from her thighs. "Is that what you're worried about?"

"I dunno, should I be?" Ben says, defensive. "I mean you said when we got started that you were gonna help me find them and now we _did_ , so—"

"Ben, that was three years ago," says Claire, and Jesse is surprised again at how insecure Ben is about her. Maybe she doesn't want to date him, fine, but she clearly cares more about him than one years-old agreement would warrant. Ben is funny and kind and he's perfectly normal; there's no reason for her not to like him. But Claire's got her blind spots, too, because she folds her arms and says, "Were you planning to do something else?"

" _I'm_ not leaving," Ben retorts. A moment later he says, quieter, "Claire. I'm not leaving."

A muscle in Claire's jaw jumps, and her whole body shivers so faintly that Jesse isn't sure if he imagined it. Her eyes drop. "Well," she says to the ground, "neither am I."

The joyous relief from Ben is so palpable that it feels like the sun just came out.

Jesse doesn't belong here. Clearly, they're happy with each other—three years is a long time to build up a dynamic, especially when you're saving each other's lives. They're not gonna want someone else tagging along like a third wheel and complicating everything. And Jesse makes things exceedingly complicated.

 _So just go_ , he tells himself. After a few more seconds of the look on Ben's face—God, if they start kissing, he is really just not going to be able to handle it—Jesse is even able to convince himself to reach for his powers, intending to jump.

Nothing happens.

This isn't like what happened at the Salt Round—Jesse can feel all his powers still there, plus all of Meg's. It's just that when he tries to make them take him away, they slip out of his mind's grasp. They're _fucking_ with him.

Okay. He was looking at Claire that time, he wasn't really concentrating. Jesse tries again. The same thing happens, like trying to take a step that isn't there. In frustration he mutters "oh, come _on_ ," and a ball of fire bursts out of his left hand.

Claire and Ben both turn to stare at him. "Um," Jesse says. "That wasn't on purpose."

Ben starts laughing, a real laugh this time, and he doesn't stop for several minutes.

"It's not funny," Jesse tries to say, but Ben's good mood is infectious and he finds himself smiling too, despite all the things that are soon to make his life very unpleasant.

"You are," Ben says, "the worst Antichrist I have ever met. C'mere."

"Wh," says Jesse, and then Ben is wrapping his arms around Jesse's torso and squeezing. Part of his mind panics and yells _is this a fight? Are we in a fight?_ But a much larger part has gone sort of soft around the edges thinking, _oh. This is—oh._

Claire catches Jesse's eye over Ben's shoulder and stage-whispers, "Better you than me." But she's smiling now too, and Ben doesn't seem to take any offense as he pulls away. (Just as well. It wouldn't do for him to stay long enough to notice how loud Jesse's heart is beating.)

"Shut up," says Ben. "We came out of this with more people alive than we started with, I'm allowed to be happy." He punches Jesse on the shoulder. "There. Masculinity restored. Now let's go get some burgers."

Jesse almost doesn't want to risk it, but he has to ask. "All of us?"

Ben's smile softens. After all, he just asked this question himself. "Yeah." A beat. "And you're picking up the bill."

"Oh, come off it," says Jesse, and in their good-natured bickering he forgets to be nervous about following the both of them back to the truck. Ben hops in the driver's seat and pats the dash fondly, arguing all the while, as Jesse climbs in and finds himself squished between these two hunters that somehow managed to become his friends.

"Seriously," Claire says in an undertone, as Jesse's silence prompts Ben to begin a monologue about cheeseburgers he has known and loved. "For as long as you want. Stay."

And that, Jesse finds, will be a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of a larger 'verse that we started back when Season 6 was airing—we conceptualized the fic and had it outlined before _Like A Virgin_  (the episode Sam gets his soul back and we see our first glimpse of Purgatory) even aired. This means it is very very very old! Before we started seriously writing the "third" main story of this verse (this is Jesse's, the sequel _Only Human_ is Ben's and is up on the 'verse page, and _Envesseled_ , Claire's story, is yet to come) we wanted to go through and edit out all the plot discrepancies and clean up the writing. The result is the fic you're reading now—it's about 50% new material, and a much cleaner, deeper story. If you enjoy the verse, please consider [following us on Tumblr](cambionverse.tumblr.com)! :3 There's lots more art/writing/etc there for your enjoyment, plus updates on upcoming installments.
> 
> And a final note—many thanks to [lexhibition](lexhibition.livejournal.com), who went over the very first draft of this story for Australianisms. Any new/remaining mistakes on this draft are ours.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Everything That Kills Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1647218) by [Caiternate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caiternate/pseuds/Caiternate)
  * [Long Shadows Falling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2752862) by [Caiternate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caiternate/pseuds/Caiternate), [thestonedelephants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestonedelephants/pseuds/thestonedelephants)




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